Linux release newest version 3.4
Monday, May 21, 2012: It’s just two months past to its last major release the release of Linux 3.3 (which includes Android support),Now Linus Torvalds has posted the newest version Linux 3.4. Linux 3.4 comes with new drivers and fixes along with several Btrfs updates.
Linux 3.4 support for over 4KB metadata blocks,new graphics processors from Nvidia and Intel, improves file system functionality and comes with a new security module and better performance. It also has X32 ABI, which is a new application binary interface that allows the users to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers.
While announcing the release of Linux 3.4, Torvalds 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.”
Linux 3.4 comes with a number of other improvements, including several security module called Yama selinux, apparmor, etc. as well as a method to cut the size of variables and pointers in memory.
Btrfs also operates faster in this newest version of the open source Linux kernel, thanks to improvements in metadata handling and interactions with the kernel’s page-caching mechanism. In one test, Btrfs was able to create 170 files per second, whereas the default file system for most Linux systems, ext4, was only able to create 110 files per second.
