The 3.8 Kernel Is An Amazing Gift To Linux Users

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 15 December 2012 at 02:06 PM EST. 7 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
While we are just a few days into the Linux 3.8 kernel merge window and there's still a number of pull requests that have yet to appear for this next kernel development cycle with new features, there's already a ton of exciting work. If you missed the horde of Phoronix articles in the past few days covering the prominent features, here's a recap showing why this Linux kernel being developed over the holidays is a great gift for its users.

Among the features for the Linux 3.8 kernel that have been merged thus far include:

- Work towards true CPU hot-plug support.

- Improved ACPI power management in the never-ending battle of improving the Linux power efficiency and performance-per-Watt.

- A wide variety of XFS file-system changes.

- Continued work on 64-bit ARMv8 / AArch64 support.

- Tons of staging driver changes.

- Support has been dropped for the old i386 CPUs to reduce the complexity of the Linux kernel.

- DMA-BUF support in V4L2 so that Video 4 Linux 2 drivers may share buffers with their DRM graphics drivers in a zero-copy manner.

- In certain workloads, the Linux kernel now goes through a lot less system memory.

- Linux support for the Microsoft Windows 8 multi-touch protocol.

- Audio driver improvements, including new sound card drivers.

- Performance improvements for cryptography on Linux.

- Support for the yet-to-be-released IBM POWER8 CPUs.

- While the DRM pull request hasn't yet been submitted, there are Radeon performance improvements, various other Radeon changes, Exynos driver improvements, Intel/Nouveau changes, and much more.

Stay tuned for more of the Linux 3.8 pull requests that have yet to surface but will in the coming week.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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