Top Features Of The Linux 3.3 Kernel

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.