Linux Kernel 3.2 Officially Released

After seven release candidates, Linus Torvalds announced a few hours ago, January 4th, the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.2.

Among the new features incorporated in Linux kernel 3.2 we can mention better support for large files by supporting block sizes bigger than 4KB and up to 1MB in EXT4, upper limits of CPU time can now be set in the process scheduler, lots of Btrfs improvements, and much more.

"So 3.2 is out, and the merge window for 3.3 is thus officially open. I delayed 3.2 first a few days to wait for the final linux-next ("final" in the sense that that's what I'll fetch to decide whether something has been in linux-next for 3.3 or not), and then some more as people were coming back from holidays and sorting out some regressions. So we do have a few last-minute reverts and small fixes."

"Still, there's not a whole lot of changes since -rc7 (shortlog appended), and almost all of them are *tiny*. So despite the few annoying last-minute reverts, I'm feeling pretty happy about it." - said Linus Torvlads in the official announcement.

Highlights of Linux Kernel 3.2: 

-Faster scrubbing, detailed corruption messages, automatic backup of tree roots, and manual inspection of metadata in Btrfs;
-Process bandwith controller;

-Support for the Hexagon architecture;

-Thin provisioning and recursive snapshots in the Device Mapper;

-I/O-less dirty throttling, reduce filesystem writeback from page reclaim;

-TCP Proportional Rate Reduction;

-Improved live profiling tool "perf top";

-Cross memory attach.

Linux kernel 3.2 also brings lots of improvements for various supported filesystems, such as EXT3, CIFS, JFFS2, EXOFS, NFS, GFS2, and SQUASHFS.

These are just a few of the new features available in Linux kernel 3.2, for a complete list check out the full changelog.

                                                                                           Source: http://news.softpedia.com