Linux 3.2 Kernel Officially Christened

Linus Torvalds officially christened the Linux 3.2 kernel on Wednesday afternoon.

The Linux 3.2 kernel holds a lot in store, but this release announcement isn't particularly exciting by Torvalds this time around. The 3.2 release was held off for a few days due to the holidays and then addressing some last minute issues by developers. "Still, there's not a whole lot of changes since -rc7 (shortlog appended), and almost all of them are *tiny*. So despite the few annoying last-minute reverts, I'm feeling pretty happy about it."

Among the changes for the Linux 3.2 kernel are the introduction of the Samsung Exynos driver, the VMware graphics driver is out of staging, lots of staging changes, Intel / Radeon / Nouveau DRM updates, and some pretty beefy Btrfs file-system changes, among other work.

The Linux 3.2 kernel is what will be used by Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, among other upcoming Linux distributions.

While the Linux 3.2 kernel is exciting, the Linux 3.3 kernel merge window is now open. There's a lot, of course, we're already excited about like the long-awaited ASPM kernel power regression fix, yet another shot at RC6 perhaps, many Nouveau enhancements, and Evergreen HDMI audio patches, plus various other merge requests to be talked about on Phoronix over the next week or two.