"It doesn't really matter what day it is, or what holiday (if any) you're celebrating. because even if you sit at home. alone in your dank basement, without any holidays or friends. I bring you tidings of great cheer: you can now download Linux-2.6.28.
and compile it to your heart's content!" That was Linus Torvalds on Christmas Eve last year. "Listen to the cheerful grinding of your hard disk as you reboot into an all-new kernel-and I'm sure that if your computer could smile. it would have a big silly grin on its non-existent face. So as you sit there in your basement, give your computer the holiday cheer too:'

Among the prime highlights of this release is obviously the ext4 mesystem being tagged stable. The backwards-compatible replacement of ext3 introduces bigger mesystems and me sizes. extents. delayed allocation. multi-block allocation, improved block allocation algorithms. faster fsck, online defragrnentation. and faster and more robust joumaling. Along with this release debuts something called. "Graphic Execution Manager" (GPM). a memory manager for the GPU memory. The GPM works as a central manager for buffer object placement, caching, mapping and synchronising.

Other features offered by the new kernel include support for Ultra Wide Band (UWB), wireless USB and UWB-IP; memory management scalability improvements; and container freezer, a cgroup subsystem that utilises the swsusp freezer to freeze and restart an arbitrary group of tasks determined by the user. Then there is a boot tracer to help developers optimise boot times; disk shock protection; along with
the inclusion of the staging branch that contains incomplete or unstable drivers. For details of all the features. refer to kemelnewbies.orgiLinux_2_6_28. Note that an update to the new karnel version has been made available with a wide range of bug fixes onJanuary 18. Linux 2.6.28.1 is available for download from www.kemel.org