With the final release of the
Linux 3.3 kernel expected to happen in
in a matter of days, here's a recap of some of the most prominent Linux 3.3 kernel features that were introduced this cycle.
- The
ASPM power regression has been properly addressed in the mainline Linux 3.3 kernel, which was subsequently back-ported to the various stable series. There's also
better ACPI / power management with this soon-to-be-christened kernel.
- Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" series
HDMI audio support, which
came via reverse-engineering.
- The
DMA-BUF Linaro buffer sharing mechanism has landed, albeit in the Linux 3.3 kernel there really aren't any major drivers taking advantage of this infrastructure yet. DMA-BUF will be important going forward.
- Ethernet teaming support to combine several physical Ethernet ports into a virtual port.
-
Xen performance fixes.
-
Many open-source graphics driver improvements, including Semaphores support in the Radeon driver, better Intel Ivy Bridge support, and Samsung Exynos driver improvements. Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA driver, also saw many improvements.
-
Byte Queue Limits (BQL) is now in place for fighting buffer-bloat.
-
Lots of staging area changes.
-
Online resize support for EXT4 file-systems.
- Intel's
NVM Express driver has been introduced.
- Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE) support for 32-bit ARMv7 devices with more than 4GB of RAM.
Plus many more changes. Within the forums you can share your most anticipated Linux features.