The 3.8 Kernel Is An Amazing Gift To Linux Users

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.