Linux 3.0 Released

Linux 3.0 has been released. Technically, the release of version 3.0 of the Linux kernel shouldn’t be too eventful, since the jump in version number doesn’t actually signify any huge change or whatever; the only reason behind the bump to 3.0 is to come to saner version numbering. Still, man, it’s like, totally version 3 of the Linux kernel.

So yeah, the year of Linux on the desktop never came, but in its place came a lot of other, possibly far more impressive stuff. The year of Linux on the server – dominating. The year of Linux on smartphones – Linux is godlike here. The year of Linux on high-performance computing – Linux aced this market. And a whole load of other things, like embedded uses for Torvalds’ baby.

Now we’re at version 3.0, but it’s a relatively minor release. “As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it’s simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux,” Torvalds writes, “In fact, the 3.0 merge window was calmer than most, and apart from some excitement from RCU I’d have called it really smooth. Which is not to say that there may not be bugs, but if anything, there are hopefully fewer than usual, rather than the normal ‘.0’ problems.”

The changes include Btrfs data scrubbing and automatic defragmentation, XEN Dom0 support, unprivileged ICMP_ECHO, wake on WLAN, Berkeley Packet Filter JIT filtering, a memcached-like system for the page cache, a sendmmsg() syscall that batches sendmsg() calls, the setns() a syscall that allows better handling of light virtualization systems such as containers, new hardware support such as Microsoft Kinect and AMD Llano Fusion APUs, and many other drivers and small changes. Full changelog here.

42 Comments

  1. 2011-07-22 9:03 am
    • 2011-07-22 10:43 am
      • 2011-07-22 2:59 pm
        • 2011-07-22 8:11 pm
    • 2011-07-22 11:50 am
      • 2011-07-22 12:11 pm
        • 2011-07-22 5:01 pm
          • 2011-07-22 5:10 pm
          • 2011-07-22 8:06 pm
    • 2011-07-22 7:04 pm
  2. 2011-07-22 10:19 am
    • 2011-07-25 2:52 pm
  3. 2011-07-22 10:46 am
  4. 2011-07-22 11:00 am
    • 2011-07-22 11:17 am
    • 2011-07-22 11:45 am
    • 2011-07-22 1:33 pm
      • 2011-07-22 3:02 pm
      • 2011-07-24 9:52 pm
    • 2011-07-22 5:04 pm
    • 2011-07-22 8:12 pm
  5. 2011-07-22 12:32 pm
  6. 2011-07-22 12:51 pm
    • 2011-07-22 8:44 pm
      • 2011-07-23 4:27 pm
    • 2011-07-22 9:06 pm
      • 2011-07-22 9:22 pm
        • 2011-07-23 3:19 pm
      • 2011-07-24 9:55 pm
        • 2011-07-24 10:53 pm
  7. 2011-07-22 1:31 pm
    • 2011-07-22 3:12 pm
  8. 2011-07-22 2:38 pm
    • 2011-07-22 3:13 pm
  9. 2011-07-22 5:21 pm
  10. 2011-07-22 10:35 pm
    • 2011-07-23 12:28 am
    • 2011-07-23 2:05 am
    • 2011-07-29 4:47 am
  11. 2011-07-23 9:42 am
    • 2011-07-23 11:09 am
    • 2011-07-24 9:58 pm