Following some initial concern earlier in the month about a large volume of small, last-minute pull requests that ultimately necessitated a seventh release candidate, Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Saturday published the final version 3.5 of the Linux kernel.
“Ok, not a lot happened since -rc7,” Torvalds admitted in his announcement email. “There’s a number of MIPS commits (for some reason MIPS has had a horrible track record with the -rc time schedule, I suspect I should just stop pulling late in the game), but most of the rest is pretty small.”
In addition to bringing a raft of new drivers and fixes, this latest version of the Linux kernel is notable for new features including metadata checksums in the Ext4 filesystem, new probes to help find performance problems in user applications, and an Android-style opportunistic suspend feature.
Ready for a rundown of the highlights? Here are some of the best new features you’ll find in Linux 3.5.