Linux 2.6.21 released

According to Linus's bog, the kernel, which has the catchy title Linux 2.6.21, comes with all sorts of abilities to run 'izations'.

This includes virtualisation with VMI which is a paravirtualisation interface that will be used by VM Ware.

KVM gets paravirtualisation support along with live migration and host suspend/resume support, there is also some NAT port randomisation.

One of the things Linus is proud of is a tickless idle loop mechanism called 'Dynticks', built in top of 'clockevents', another feature that unifies the timer handling and brings "true" high-resolution timers. This was a bit of a pain to integrate, Linus said.

"If the goal for 2.6.20 was to be a stable release (and it was), the goal for 2.6.21 is to have just survived the big timer-related changes," Torvalds said.

Other features include a bigger kernel parameter-line, support for the PA SEMI PWRficient CPU and for the Cell-based 'celleb' Toshiba gear, NFS IPv6 support, IPv4 IPv6 IPSEC tunneling, UFS2 write, kprobes for PPC32, kexec and oprofile for ARM, public key encryption for ecryptfs, Fcrypt and Camilla cipher algorithms, audit lockdown mode, some new drivers and many other small improvements.

And all the ZZZZZs can be found here. µ