Linux 3.4 Release Has Arrived; Prominent Features Listed

Just two months back, we got the news of #-Link-Snipped-# that had Android support included. And now, Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 3.4. Apart from the new drivers and fixes, among the major features in the 3.4 release, we have several Btrfs updates. It includes support for more than 4KB metadata blocks with better performance. A new X32 ABI ((Application Binary Interface) allows us to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers. The GPU drivers have been updated as well. It supports early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and also support of Intel Medfield graphics.


Linux kernel 3.4 release has support for x86 cpu driver autoprobing, a device-mapper target that stores cryptographic hashes of blocks to check for intrusions. We also have another target to use external read-only devices as origin source of a thin provisioned LVM volume, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module. While announcing the 3.4 release, Linus said "Nothing really exciting happened since -rc7, although the workaround for a linker bug on x86 is larger than I'd have liked at this stage, and sticks out like a sore thumb in the diffstat. That said, it's not like even that patch was really all that scary." You may check the complete set of features <a href="https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Linux_3.4 - Linux Kernel Newbies</a> and the <a href="https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/20/126" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">LKML: Linus Torvalds: Linux 3.4 released</a>.