From the ‘big, bigger, biggest’ files:
Late Saturday night, Linus Torvalds released what could well be the largest incremental Linux kernel update in history with 3.10 rc 1
“So this is the biggest -rc1 in the last several years (perhaps ever) at least as far as counting commits go, even if not necessarily in actual lines (I didn’t check the statistics on that),” Tovalds wrote in a mailing list message.
Looking through the commits, obviously there are a lot of driver updates (as there always are). Linux continues to be enable for new hardware faster than ever (and before other OSes too.)
Linux 3.10 also looks to be a massive landing pad for KVM virtualization improvements too. Red Hat developer Gleb Natapov’s tree got pulledin for the Linux 3.10 rc1 milestone.
Filesystem caching could also be in line for a big performance boost thanks to the new bCache framework which has landed in the 3.10 rc1 milestone.
According to the Linux git documentation fileon bCache:
Say you’ve got a big slow raid 6, and an X-25E or three. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use them as cache… Hence bcache…t’s designed around the performance characteristics of SSDs – it only allocates in erase block sized buckets, and it uses a hybrid btree/log to track cached extants (which can be anywhere from a single sector to the bucket size).
Still very early days for Linux 3.10, with at least five more weeks of development, but it’s exciting to see that the pace of Linux development continues to accelerate in 2013.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.