Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.34. In brief  "This version adds two new filesystem, the distributed filesystem Ceph and LogFS, a filesystem for flash devices.

Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance, the VMware ballon driver, the "kprobes jump" optimization for dynamic probes, new perf features (the "perf lock" tool, cross-platform analysis support), support for GPU switching, several Btrfs improvements, RCU lockdep, Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (RFC 5082) and private VLAN proxy arp (RFC 3069) support, asynchronous suspend/resume, several new drivers and many other small improvements."

I'm sure you as end use do not care about all that stuff :). Therefore, I would like to pick what I see is important for end user in this release.

1-Asynchronous suspend/resume: The power management code has been modified to allow asynchronous suspend/resume, allowing drivers to do device suspend/resume in parallel, which improves the time used to suspend/resume devices quite a lot. In this version, PCI, USB and SCSI devices do asynchronous suspend/resume by default.

2-GPU switching: Some laptops have two GPUs, a low-power and inefficient GPU and a high-power and powerful GPU. Users should be able to switch to one or another at runtime. In this version, Linux adds support for this feature. You need to restart X, though.

3-Preliminary Radeon Evergreen (Radeon HD 5xxx) support: This version adds preliminary support for Radeon Evergreen (Radeon HD 5xxx). It isn't ready for users (no acceleration at all), but it's progressing.

4- A lot of new drivers

Other news sources tracking the kernel changes

• LWN

  • 2.6.34 Merge window, part 1

  • 2.6.34 Merge window, part 2

• H-Online Linux Kernel 2.6.34 tracking

  • Kernel Log: Ceph file system in 2.6.34, kernel and KVM presentations at the CLT2010

  • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 1) - Network Support

  • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 2) - File Systems

  • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 3) - Graphics

  • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 4): Architecture and Virtualisation

  • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 5) - Drivers

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