05 February 2008, 14:51

WLAN just like that

Thorsten Leemhuis

Kernel developers incorporated seven new wireless network drivers into Linux version 2.6.24, considerably improving its support of modern wireless networking hardware. Due to the changes to the still maturing CFS scheduler, the new kernel should also be faster than its predecessors and provide better interactivity. The new version also offers numerous improvements to the kernel's infrastructure, new and improved drivers galore and a comprehensively restructured source code for x86 systems.

With around one and a quarter of a million new, moved or deleted lines of source code, kernel hackers worked harder than ever before for Linux 2.6.24. This marks a new record in the development of the 2.6 kernel series which could be upheld for quite some time.

A major portion of the changes were caused by the unification of the source code directories for the 32-bit and the 64-bit x86 architecture. However, there are also numerous further improvements like the extension of the still maturing CFS scheduler, support for high resolution timers and dynamic ticks for non-x86-32 systems as well as many other adjustments. As always, a good number of new and improved drivers considerably improves the new kernel's hardware support - seven new wireless network drivers were, for example, added to provide support for the wireless networking hardware included in many modern notebooks and networking products.

Linux statistics
Linux version	development cycle	number of patches	diffstat
2.6.19	71 days	6685	8040 files changed, 515161 insertions(+), 291784 deletions(-)
2.6.20	66 days	4768	5825 files changed, 262475 insertions(+), 136162 deletions(-)
2.6.21	80 days	5016	6568 files changed, 319232 insertions(+), 175247 deletions(-)
2.6.22	74 days	6526	7620 files changed, 519591 insertions(+), 266699 deletions(-)
2.6.23	93 days	6662	7203 files changed, 406268 insertions(+), 339071 deletions(-)
2.6.24	107 days	9836	10209 files changed, 776107 insertions(+), 483031 deletions(-)

Several megabytes of changelog describe all the new kernel's changes in detail; you'll find an overview of the most important ones on the following pages.

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