Linux 3.2 Now Available

Linus Torvalds officially released the Linux kernel 3.2.

 "I delayed 3.2 first a few days to wait for the final linux-next ("final" in the sense that that's what I'll fetch to decide whether something has been in linux-next for 3.3 or not), and then some more as people were coming back from holidays and sorting out some regressions," Torvalds wrote in the announcement.

"So we do have a few last-minute reverts and small fixes. Still, there's not a whole lot of changes since -rc7 (shortlog appended), and almost all of them are *tiny*. So despite the few annoying last-minute reverts, I'm feeling pretty happy about it," he wrote.

Among the new features are support for the power saving technology RC6 for Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs, which now also covers the graphics unit of the processors. The Nouveau driver adds acceleration support Nvidia's Fermi chips, including NVC1, NVC8 and NVCF GPUs. The TCP stack received support for proportional rate reduction (PRR), the Ext4 file system supports big allocation blocks and the experimental Btrfs has been patched. Additionally, the developers added drivers for two new WLAN chips, Broadcom's Brcm80211 and Atheros' AR6003.