The 2.6.28 Linux kernel is released

Just before Christmas, Wed 24 December 2008, Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.28 Linux Kernel.

"In fact, even _if_ you have friends or family, leave them to their endless toil over that christmas ham or turkey, and during the night, when they're asleep, you can give them that magical present of a newly updated computer. When they wake up tomorrow morning, tell them how you saw Santa crawl down the chimney with his USB stick in hand, updating the OS of all good boys and girls. Ho, ho, ho, Linus "almost Santa" Torvalds"

For those who don't know what I am talking about the Linux Kernel is an operating system kernel used by a family of Unix-like operating systems. These are popularly termed Linux operating systems. The name Linux is used to refer to various distributions built on top of the Linux Kernel. Two of the most popular distributions are Ubuntu and Fedora. The Linux kernel is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) and developed by contributors worldwide. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of Open Source software. The Linux kernel was initially conceived and created by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds in 1991. This is the historical part. Read below to learn what the features of this new version are.

Linux 2.6.28 adds the first version of Ext4 as a stable filesystem, the much-expected GEM (GPU memory manager) which will be the foundation of a renewed graphic stack, support for Ultra Wide Band (Wireless USB, UWB-IP), memory management scalability and performance improvements, a boot tracer, disk shock protection, the phonet network protocol, support of SSD discard requests, transparent proxy support, several new network drivers, controlable IO CPU affinity, high-resolution poll()/select(), support of a minimal "dummy" policy in SELinux, tracing improvements, x86 x2APIC support, a fb driver for VIA UniChrome devices, Mitac Mio A701 ARM-based smartphone support, some new drivers, improved device support, and many other small improvements and fixes.

Ext4 is the evolution of the most used Linux filesystem, Ext3. In many ways, Ext4 is a deeper improvement over Ext3 than Ext3 was over Ext2. Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to Ext2, but Ext4 modifies important data structures of the filesystem such as the ones destined to store the file data. The result is a filesystem with an improved design, better performance, reliability and features.

In the last decade graphics hardware has evolved at an astounding pace, and it's expected to improve even more in the future. Modern GPUs have a lot of processing power -more than the most powerful CPU in some specialized workloads- that traditionally has only been used by specialized applications using opengl/directx, like games and 3D design apps; the 2D desktop implementations that are commonly found in computers kept using this modern graphic hardware in the same way they used the old graphics hardware which started the "desktop revolution" in the 80-90's, ie. inefficiently. There's a lot of GPU power that don't get used unless you run a game. On the other hand, the Linux/FOSS graphic stack is far from perfect, even for the traditional graphic stack design. To start with, there're several drivers fighting to access the same resource (the graphics card): The fb-based console, the in-kernel DRM driver, the X.org userspace 2D driver...this situation leads to all class of problems and artifacts and suboptimal performance.

There has been a lot of work in the latest years to modernize the Linux graphics stack so that it's both well designed and also ready to use the full power of modern and future GPUs. In 2.6.28, Linux is adding one of the most important pieces of the stack: A memory manager for the GPU memory, called GEM ("Graphic Execution Manager"). The purpose is to have a central manager for buffer object placement, caching, mapping and synchronization. On top of GEM are being built a lot of improvementes to the graphic stack: Kernel Modesetting, DRI2, UXA (a EXA implementation based in GEM). The Linux/FOSS graphics stack will be finally unified and optimally coupled.

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