After ten weeks of work the team led by Linus Torvalds, already have with us a new version of the Linux kernel 2.6.1938 Linux is a version that promises greater speed, thanks to some adjustments, including the famous patch of 200 lines of code, and have added new drivers for graphics and Wi-Fi and added support for the new AMD Fusion chips, among many other features are summarized below.

overtook, this version has improved automatic grouping of processes using the patch than 223 lines of code developed by Mike Galbraith in November last year. In essence, the patch changes the way the scheduler assigns CPU time to each process so that the system can group all the processes with the same session ID. This, under certain scenarios an enormous additional performance delivered by the evidence.

Another change is related to improvements in scalability VFS (Virtual File System) , which has made both of workloads such as multi-thread loads some unique processes, are much faster. On the other side to Btrfs adds transparent compression support for the LZO algorithm as an alternative to zlib and adding support to mark snapshots read-only and the feature “force mounting”.

improvement has to do with “Transparent Huge Pages”, which will use up to 2MB of memory pages to process (where hitherto 4KB), which is done to better exploit the hardware and achieve a “higher performance, especially in workloads that require a large amount of memory as a server JVM and database, as they said Tim Burke, vice president of engineering for Red Hat Linux.

also add the proactive routing protocol for Ad-hoc Mesh Networks Wireless: BATMAN (Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking), which in practice will help provide network connectivity in the presence of natural disasters, military conflicts or censorship of the Internet thanks to this protocol allows the network to function as a mesh routing where each node involved in forwarding data to other nodes dynamically.

And finally we can emphasize hardware support as always, increases core version to version. With regard to this is very good to know that added support for the new AMD Fusion , which as we know combines CPU and GPU into a single unit (APU), and the inclusion of new graphics drivers for GPUs NVidia and AMD has also added better support for Wi-Fi cards like Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, Ralink and Realtek, etc.

That

among many other changes have been made “in record time. You can see more detail on the following link, I also recommend this article prepared by H-Online which detailed some of the background changes and features have been added in this release. If you want you can also download the new kernel from here or wait patiently to be included in a future version of your favorite distro.