The 3.0 kernel is out

[Posted July 22, 2011 by corbet]

Linus has announced the release of the 3.0 kernel. "As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux. In fact, the 3.0 merge window was calmer than most, and apart from some excitement from RCU I'd have called it really smooth." Beyond the numbering scheme change, this kernel includes POSIX alarm timer support, a just-in-time compiler for BPF packet filters, a new sendmmsg() system call, ICMP sockets, the merging of the Xen backend driver (completing the long process of getting Xen Dom0 support into the kernel), namespace file descriptors, and more. See the KernelNewbies 3.0 page for lots of details.

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 3:47 UTC (Fri) by Hausvib6 (guest, #70606) [Link] (3 responses)

Wake on WLAN feature is interesting as it opens the way for a suspended (S3) laptop to fries itself/drains its juice if it's "accidentally" woken up while taking a nap inside a comfy bag. It doesn't need to resume perfectly, which may be a good thing since it can go back to sleep if it detects that the lid is closed.

Anyway, this is a great release. Now I can save some power on my headless laptop (fried onboard Nvidia) which is used as a home file server.

I'm sure there will be some big headlines over several mainstream media mentioning the release of a new major version of Linux 3.

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 9:43 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (2 responses)

One would hopefully not enable the feature on a laptop.

It sounds useful on something like my desktop box, though, which uses a DWA-556 802.11n card due to the layout of my apartment (why must the cable TV access jack be two rooms away from my den?). I leave the machine running so I can SSH into it when I'm out at a cafe or on campus, but I'm sure it'd do my finances and the environment a solid if I let it sleep during the 96% of the day in which I'm not using it.

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 13:54 UTC (Fri) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not sure why people thing WoWLAN is such a big deal (even calling it an implementation of the "Wake on Wireless Standard" in some online publications, there's no such thing).

First of all, the work I did there is only a little bit of infrastructure work, the interesting parts are in drivers, and the first of those will likely be in 3.2 (!), I think we just missed 3.1 with the implementation for iwlagn (and then, the necessary firmware is also not released yet).

Secondly, you always have to configure it manually with iw unless some application will take it up, it'll never be turned on by default by the kernel.

One of the use cases that some people are aiming for is for a smartphone -- allow the phone to be connected but stay on the wifi and wake up when there's any activity like an incoming call. 2G/3G/4G also have an embedded processor so they can do the same thing, so you just get more battery efficiency out of it. The use case on the other end of the spectrum is enterprise management. I'm sure there will be many things inbetween as well :-)

However, beyond the simple smartphone case, all use cases will require some additional management application to determine what the wakeup triggers should be and that enables the feature.

Oh and another possibility in the future might be your device waking up when it finds a network to connect to, not only when something happens on the network it is connected to. Think scheduled scan feature (recent additiona as well) combined with WoWLAN.

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 24, 2011 0:26 UTC (Sun) by xxiao (guest, #9631) [Link]

the wake-on-* is pretty hardware/driver specific, unsurprisingly, some hardware will need NDA before you can implement that feature, I just did WOL with a Realtek chip which requires NDA doc.

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 7:34 UTC (Fri) by chax (guest, #52122) [Link] (1 responses)

On KernelNewbies there's a small mention of the new Realtek rtl81xx drivers being merged, but it isn't precise on which new hardware is supported - the new drivers are for rtl8192cu and rtl8192se (a device present in some ION netbooks, like Eee PC 1201N for which there was, until today, only an ugly out-of-tree driver).

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 7:42 UTC (Fri) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

As usual the h-online article is more detailled than kernelnewbies: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-i...

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 15:47 UTC (Fri) by yodermk (guest, #3803) [Link]

Waiting for some clueless journalist to write something like ... "The Linux kernel, which hasn't seen a major release in nearly 8 years, ..."

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 16:13 UTC (Fri) by Sho (subscriber, #8956) [Link] (4 responses)

Looks like it's actually the 3.0.0 kernel?

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=kernel.git;a=commit;...

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 21:14 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

I think this is perfectly fine:

3.0.0 mainline base
3.0.1 first stable
...
3.1.0 next mainline base

Nothing wrong with that.

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 22, 2011 23:42 UTC (Fri) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link] (2 responses)

Judging by the tarball filename, it's still 3.0: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/ contains linux-3.0.tar.bz2, and does not contain linux-3.0.0.tar.bz2.

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 23, 2011 0:15 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

I think we need to take a lesson from Lewis Carroll's Crimson Knight here.

The kernel is called "3.0", but it's name is "3.0.0" ... and it's name is called "confusing but necessary".

http://www.sabian.org/looking_glass8.php

The 3.0 kernel is out

Posted Jul 23, 2011 16:55 UTC (Sat) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link]

White Knight, actually. Or at least, that's what he calls himself...