Linus Torvalds announced yesterday on the Linux kernel mailing list the official release of Linux 2.6.27. This release includes some nice improvements and follows roughly three months after the release of 2.6.26.

This new version adds the ath9k wireless driver from Atheros, the gspca driver, which will significantly extend the number of webcam devices supported on Linux, a new function tracing framework and memory-mapped IO tracing tool that will simplify debugging, support for delayed allocation (a performance improvement) in the Ext4 filesystem, and UBIFS, a new filesystem designed for flash storage devices. Scalability got a boost in this release because of the lockless page cache feature and newly added support for systems with up to 4096 processors.

Additional Ext4 improvements, preemptible spinlocks, and support for syslets are areas of focus for upcoming releases, according to the Linux Foundation’s Linux Weather Forecast.

The Kernel Newbies web site has additional details about the release. You can also check out the full changelog and download the patch (13.9 MB compressed) from kernel.org.

Source: ARSTECHNICA

FEATURES AND CHANGES:

2.6.27 add a new filesystem (UBIFS) optimized for “pure” flash-based storage devices, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation for ext4, multiqueue networking, an alternative hibernation implementation based on kexec/kdump, data integrity support in the block layer for devices that support it, a simple tracer called ftrace, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, extraction of all the in-kernel’s firmware to /lib/firmware, XEN support for saving/restorig VMs, improved video camera support, support for the Intel wireless 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 family of chipsets, more new drivers, improved support for others and many other improvements and fixes.

It contains various updates and changes. check all of them with their documentation in the below url.

Find the Features and Changes Now !