The first release candidate for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel is now available. As always, it’s full of driver and filesystem updates.
From a performance perspective there is a new block device plugging model.
“It makes plugging a
per-thread thing and cleaned up the code considerably,” Linus Torvalds wrote in a mailing list posting. “It also avoids
lots of locking in a very hot path, and should generally be a really
good idea.”
There are still likely at least six more RC before 2.6.39 will be final, but the timing is likely to bring it out past the next cycle of Linux distribution releases from both Red Hat Fedora and Ubuntu.
Both Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 are on track to use the recently released Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which introduced some significant performance gains.
