Interesting Features For The Linux 3.6 Kernel

The Linux 3.6 kernel is set to make its official debut in the coming weeks and -- as usual -- there's many interesting features to this next major open-source kernel release.

There's been many articles on Phoronix about the forthcoming Linux 3.6 kernel, even before Linux 3.5 was even officially out, but here's some notes covering the prominent work to this next Linux kernel release:

- First of all, with the extensive Linux graphics interest by Phoronix readers, the open-source driver improvements aren't too amazing this time around. There are some Intel performance improvements, but nothing that's been overhauled across the board. The only really prominent change for the Radeon DRM driver is that it finally enables PCI Express 2.0 by default.

- The Btrfs file-system has been working on send/receive and sub-volume quotas support.

- Various EXT4 file-system updates.

- EFI Handover Protocol support is now in place on the kernel side. This will allow some nifty things when the UEFI boot-loaders support this protocol.

- Intel Ivy Bridge CPU-Idle support plus a rewritten TurboStat utility.

- TCP Small Queues for the continued attempts at fighting network Bufferbloat.

- Client-side support for TCP Fast Open.

- V4L2 improvements.

- The VFIO driver was introduced for securely assigning physical devices to Linux virtual machines.

Overall there's lots of modest changes to the Linux 3.6 kernel, but nothing too jaw-dropping. It's a never-ending game and there's already lots of good stuff being assembled for the Linux 3.7 kernel.