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Kernel version status

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released stable kernel version 3.2.6 and long-term kernel versions 2.6.32.57 and 3.0.21. The maintainer's release email expressly includes the usual recommendation that those with self-compiled kernels switch to one of the new versions; as usual, the new versions offer various fixes and minor low-risk improvements.

Kernel versions 3.0.20 and 3.2.5, which were released a couple of days earlier, were an exception in this respect: they introduced only one modification, but one that was slightly more risky than usual. It enables these and subsequent kernels to use the ASPM PCIe power management feature even if the BIOS' ACPI tables contain a certain inconsistency. One user reported that these changes cause individual PCIe devices to fail; a patch corrects this issue but wasn't integrated into kernel versions 3.0.21 and 3.2.6.

Willy Tarreau has confirmed that he plans to take over the maintenance of 2.6.32 when Kroah-Hartman discontinues it – which will probably be fairly soon. Recently, Tarreau also released long-term kernel version 2.6.27.60, which includes about 90 minor changes; soon afterwards he released version 2.6.27.61 to fix a bug in its predecessor. These are the first long-term kernels in the .27 series since April 2011.

On 9 February, Linus Torvalds announced the arrival of the third release candidate (RC3) for Linux 3.3. In his announcement email, Torvalds said that it contains no big surprises, and that this is how he likes it. The fourth RC will probably follow in the near future.

In brief

Graphics hardware support

  • Jeremy Huddleston has released versions 1.10.5 and 1.10.6 of X.org's X Server, which mainly offer bug fixes. Simultaneously, Keith Packard has released xorg-server 1.11.99.903, a new pre-release version of X Server 1.12.
  • Xavier Bachelot has released xf86-video-openchrome 0.2.905; this is the first version of this driver for VIA graphics cores to address the VX900 chip-set and to support Xvideo in the VX855.
  • Daniel Vetter has released version 1.2 of the intel-gpu-tools, a collection that offers various testing and troubleshooting tools mainly for Intel graphics hardware.
  • NVIDIA has released version 295.20 of its proprietary graphics drivers for Linux x86-32/x86 and x86-64/x64. They now support the Tesla X2090, as well as 30-bit colour depth in series 8 and newer GeForce models. They also fix a number of bugs, including one that could crash KDE or the GNOME shell. The new driver versions are designed to work with some pre-release versions of X Server 1.12.
  • Jerome Glisse has released version 2.4.31 of the libdrm, which the kernel and the 3D drivers of Mesa 3D use to communicate with each other.
  • The Nouveau presentation at this year's FOSDEM, which was already mentioned in a news item on Mesa 3D 8.0, provides some information on the latest developments regarding this open source graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics chips. For instance, speeding up or slowing down the chip elements and memory of GeForce generation NV50 graphics cores (including GeForce series 8000 and 9000) is reported to be quite reliable with the code in the developer branch. The developers also say that they have made progress in terms of fan control, but that more work is required.
  • Phoronix's YouTube channel offers a video recording of the presentation the Nouveau developers gave at FOSDEM. The channel also contains various other video recordings from this year's FOSDEM – for example one on the experimental OpenGL support for NV50 graphics processors by NVIDIA. An overview of the developments in the Intel graphics driver environment is available in Eric Anholt's talk. Another video contains a presentation in which Luc Verhaegen discusses the recently released, but currently rudimentary, open source graphics driver he develops for ARM Mali cores. Information on the multi-touch support for X Server 1.12 can be found in the video of X.org developer Peter Hutterer's presentation.
  • In a recent blog posting, Hutterer explained how the multi-touch support that is planned for X Server 1.12 interacts with multi-touch touchpads.

Next: More in brief - Btrfs, Util-Linux

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