Linux 3.5-rc1 Kernel Has Been Released

While the Linux 3.5-rc1 kernel was tagged on Saturday, the announcement didn't come out until today. Regardless, the Linux 3.5-rc1 kernel is now available with lots of interesting changes.

From the release announcement, Linus Torvalds classifies this as another "pretty normal release" and "Depending on what your interest is, you might be excited about the CoDel packet scheduler, or about the GPU driver updates, or the new scsi targets. There is something in here for pretty much anybody."

Below are the Linux 3.5 kernel changes that have caught my interest thus far.

- A fair amount of Intel graphics driver changes.

- The AST KMS driver was merged for the ASpeed graphics hardware plus another KMS driver.

- There's now QEMU KMS driver support for the virtual Cirrus hardware.

- Many other open-source graphics driver changes.

- DMA-BUF PRIME support was merged. DMA-BUF itself also received MMAP/VMAP support.

- There's finally audio support for the Creative Sound Core3D sound cards that succeed the Sound Blaster X-Fi. There's also support for the Xonar DGX sound card and other audio updates.

- Better input support for the kernel drivers.

- A multitude of ARM device improvements.

- CRC32 meta-data support for EXT4.

- Some technical Btrfs file-system improvements.