Kernel.org have the goods we’ve been waiting for. The world of Linux 2.6 brings a whole myriad of new things for developers and users. Joseph Pranevich provides us a detailed write up on the changes since Linux 2.4.
Although it seems like only yesterday that we were booting up our first Linux 2.4 systems, time has ticked by and the kernel development team has just released the 2.6 kernel to the public. This document is intended as a general overview of the features in the new kernel release, with a heavy bias toward i386 Linux. Please also be aware that some of the “new” features discussed here may have been back-ported to Linux 2.4 after first appearing in Linux 2.6, either officially or by a distribution vendor. I have also included information on a handful of cases where a new feature originated during the maintenance cycle of Linux 2.4, and those will be marked as appropriate in the text.
Improvements including and not limited to such things as:
- Scalability downwards and upwards with embedded systems, NUMA systems and Bigger Iron
- Improvements in the support of hyperthreading where a single pysical processor can execute more than one thread at a time and presents itself as two or more logical processing units
- Interactivity and responsiveness has been tackled with changes to the Input/Output system and sporting of a kernel that is finally preemptible
- Modularised subsystem and Unified Device Model
- Support of new technologies such as USB2, Wireless Devices, S-ATA and so on
- Filesystem support extended such as XFS and ReiserFS v4 along with a new partitio table scheme called “Windows’ Logical Disk Manager” née “Dynamic Disks” introduced in Windows 2000
- Audio & Multimedia improvements with ALSA, Video4Linux and built-in support for DVB hardware
- Improvements to the networking stack and network filesystems
- User access to the system is now finer grained eliminating potential root exploits
- Virtualized Linux where the operating system can run within itself as a user-mode application useful for development or security analysis