Linux 3.2-rc2 Kernel Doesn't Bring Too Much Churn

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.2-rc2 kernel this morning. Considering the long development cycle of the Linux 3.2 kernel, this second development release is relatively tame.

"For being an -rc2 release of a pretty large merge-window, it seems to be quite reasonably sized. In fact, despite this having been the largest linux-next in a release in our linux-next history (I think), rc2 has the exact same number of commits since rc1 as we had during the 3.1 release," says Linus Torvalds in the kernel mailing list announcement.

Roughly half the changes in the past week since 3.2-rc1 have been architecture fixes, about a quarter of the changes are driver related (with a large part of that being the DRM graphics) and the remaining quarter being file-systems and everything else.

In terms of the DRM fixes in Linux 3.2-rc2, there's some power management fixes for Radeon KMS, Nouveau NVC1 acceleration is enabled by default, and various other changes, but Intel RC6 isn't yet turned on by default.

Also in the 3.2-rc2 kernel are several Btrfs file-system fixes, following its pretty beefy changes this release cycle.

That about covers this week's release candidate of the Linux 3.2 kernel. The Linux 3.2 kernel is what will make-up Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and other Linux distributions releasing in early 2012.