The Linux 2.6.36-rc2 Kernel Is Out With An Announcement

The Linux 2.6.36-rc2 kernel has been released this Sunday afternoon and this time around there's an announcement of the release by Linus Torvalds (he lacked announcing 2.6.36-rc1; Phoronix was one of the few places reporting on it). The 2.6.36-rc2 kernel release brings mostly bug/regression fixes, but compared to the Linux 2.6.35 kernel, Linus has accepted some pull requests after the -rc1 release in the Linux 2.6.36 kernel while denying other requests.

Pulled into the Linux 2.6.36-rc2 release are some of the VFS patches by Nick Piggin, but unfortunately not all of the VFS scalability patches previously talked about that are to provide some nice core performance gains. Most of those VFS patches sadly are now queued up for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel.

The second major change in the 2.6.36-rc2 release is another Intel DRM pull (there was already some fun Linux graphics improvements committed to 2.6.36-rc1 and a second pull request that added NVIDIA Fermi KMS support). This Intel KMS/DRM driver pull has quite a number of driver fixes by Chris Wilson. The changes aren't too exciting, but should be good news for anyone that has been suffering from Intel kernel driver problems. There is added fair LRU eviction, ring-buffer fixes, Intel Sandybridge changes, Ironlake-specific fixes, more Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) work, and other changes scattered throughout.

Some of the other Linux 2.6.36 changes talked about by Linus Torvalds in today's release announcement is fanotify -- the latest kernel notification rewrite, workqueue work, and VM layer updates. The fanotify system was started out by Red Hat to cater to the needs of some anti-malware vendors as a better way to handle file scanning with this new notification system and an access system to block processes until a fanotify user-space listener has cleared the operation. However, fanotify is not a security system for Linux but rather an interface to allow such to be implemented.

The release announcement for the Linux 2.6.36-rc2 kernel can be found at LKML.org. We continue to benchmark the very latest Linux kernel on a daily basis at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com.