New Linux kernel is out

10 Oct 2007 | 11:21 BST

By Egan Orion

LINUX KERNEL 2.6.23 has been released by Linus Torvalds.

There's a whole bundle of stuff in there, Linus says. These are outlined in the "short" overview in the release notes.

Take a deep breath, because here it comes: "2.6.23 includes the new, better, fairer CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, make SLUB the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes."

Should any of these topics particularly interest you, there's a massive lot of additional detail that's worthy of graduate school computer science coursework available in the rest of the Release Notes.

There will probably be a few more patches as this new kernel sees use in a wider variety of systems - including yours, should you choose to play with it - but it should be fairly stable within a couple of months, at which time you'll begin to see the major Linux distributions start releasing systems based upon it. µ

L'INQ
Release Notes

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007