The much-anticipated new Linux Kernel, known by the catchy name of 2.6.28, was released Christmas Eve. From Linus Torvald’s official announcement:

It doesn’t really matter what day it is, or what holiday (if any) you’re celebrating, because even if you sit at home, alone in your dank basement, without any holidays or friends, I bring you a tiding of great cheer: you can now download Linux-2.6.28, and compile it to your hearts content!

Listen to the cheerful grinding of your harddisk as you reboot into an all-new kernel – and I’m sure that if your computer could smile, it would have a big silly grin on its non-existent face. So as you sit there in
your basement, give your computer the holiday cheer too.

In fact, even _if_ you have friends or family, leave them to their endless toil over that christmas ham or turkey, and during the night, when they’re asleep, you can give them that magical present of a newly updated computer. When they wake up tomorrow morning, tell them how you saw Santa crawl down the chimney with his USB stick in hand, updating the OS of all good boys and girls.

Ho, ho, ho,

Linus “almost Santa” Torvalds

Err… Right.

On a more serious note, the kernel brings some rather excellent new updates. These come in the form of GEM (no, not that one), a GPU memory manager which will vastly improve graphics performance, and the final release version of the Ext4 filesystem, which improves upon the already excellent reliability of Ext3, as well as reducing fragmentation.

GEM is supported by Intel graphics drivers, which is at least good news for most of the laptop users out there who are using Intel’s chipsets. On the bog-standard, bottom end Intel 915 chipset, framerates are said to be increased by 50-60%, and the new system should bring Linux inline with the advanced graphical subsystems of Windows Vista and OS X Leopard. In the longer term, it is expected that other graphics drivers will take advantage of GEM, too.

Ext4 is the successor to Linux’s most popular filesystem, Ext3. The new release increases the maximum filesystem size to 1 exabyte, and allows users to create an unlimited number of subdirectories in any given directory (up from Ext3’s limit of 32,000). Filesystem checks are also up to 20 times faster than in Ext3. Finally, Ext3 users can upgrade to Ext4 and begin taking advantage of the new features straight away without having to reformat (although this is not recommended without checking if your distro’s version of GRUB supports the new filesystem first – apparently Debian-derived distros do, including Ubuntu).

Finally, and this point is only really interesting to driver developers, the way unsupported and experimental drivers are organised and implemented has been overhauled. For us end users, that means that driver development for new hardware should be quicker and easier, meaning sooner availability of new drivers.

You can roll your own kernel for now, but as always it’s probably best to wait until your distribution’s packagers make the new kernel available officially.

As you can see, a pretty big revolutionary release!

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