Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 3.11. As usual, the actual release announcement says little except noting last minute bug fixes because the feature set was nailed down when the merge window closed weeks ago. One of the useful new features is the abiity to open files as O_TMPFILE for more private temporary files; open a file with O_TMPFILE and its created and works as normal except it doesn’t appear in the filesystem and when you close it it gets unlinked.
Support for NFS 4.2 and SELinux-labelled NFS has also made it into 3.11 albeit on a preliminary basis. On ARM, Huge Pages (allocations of memory by a process much in excess of the default 4K) are now supported for 2MB sections of memory and KVM and Xen support has landed in the ARM64 architecture. Throw in performance enhancements for SYSV IPC queues and low latency network pooling, top with a compresses swap cache called Zswap and thats your core 3.11. Experimental code for dynamic power support for Radeon graphics cards (r600 to now) is also now available and over in staging, Lustre distributed filesystem client support has also begun to emerge.
A summary of the core changes is up on KernelNewbies along with the driver/architecture changes. But in short, its another workman like update for the kernel, nothing too exciting but hundreds of small improvements. And now onto 3.12.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog