Linux 3.10 released

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    On Sunday evening , the new Linux 3.10 kernel was officially released . According to Linus Torvalds, the core turned out to be the largest in terms of innovation over the past few years. Linus initially intended to release another release candidate, but was inclined to release the final release of 3.10 - and in his message he notes that the new kernel, like Linux 3.9, is not prone to performance problems and is ready for everyday use.

    In the announcement of the RC version, Torvalds wrote that he usually included a list of names of people who sent certain parts of the code, but this time this list was so large that it could not be listed entirely on one mailing list.

    An incomplete list of changes made to the kernel 3.10:

    • You can prevent scripts from being executed as programs — the functionality for launching scripts containing the path to the interpreter in the header "#!" Can now be compiled as a kernel module;
    • The Bcache system developed and used by Google is integrated. Bcache allows you to organize caching of access to slow hard drives on fast SSD-drives; caching is carried out at the level of the block device - and this allows you to speed up access to the drive, and regardless of the file systems used on the device;
    • The kernel can be built by the Clang compiler thanks to the patches prepared by the LLVMLinux project;
    • A dynamic timer interrupt control system has appeared. Now, depending on the current state, you can change interrupts in the range from thousands of ticks per second to one interrupt per second - this allows you to minimize the load on the CPU when processing interrupts in case of system inactivity. Now this function is used for real-time systems and HPC (high-performance computing), but in future releases of the kernel it will be used for desktop systems too;
    • Now it is possible to generate an event with an application notification about approaching the exhaustion of an available process / memory system (in cgroups);
    • For the perf team, memory access profiling has become available;
    • A new “sync” driver (experimental) has appeared. It was developed as part of the Android platform and is used to synchronize between other drivers;
    • A driver has appeared for Microsoft Hyper-V virtual video adapters (there are also improvements in Hyper-V performance in general);
    • Now supported are new power management tools that have appeared in the AMD 16h family of processors (“Jaguar”);
    • Support for video decoding acceleration using the UVD hardware decoder built into AMD’s modern GPUs has been added to the Radeon DRM module;
    • Added support for the RDMA protocol (iSER) in the iSCSI subsystem;
    • The implementation of cryptographic functions (sha256, sha512, blowfish, twofish, serpent and camellia) is optimized using the AVX / AVX2 and SSE instructions .;
    • The QXL virtual graphics card driver was integrated (used in virtualization systems for faster graphics output using the SPICE protocol).

    More about changes (eng)

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