Linux 2.6.30 is currently in development. The release candidate -rc1 was released the 7 April 2009, closing the merge window.

This page is, obviously, a work in progress.

Summary:

TableOfContents()

Prominent features (the cool stuff)

NILFS2 log-structured filesystem

[http://www.nilfs.org NILFS2] (new implementation of a log-structured file system 2) is a log-structured filesystem, which allows continuous snapshotting.

Support for Object-Based Storage Device

Object-Based Storage Device (OSD) are basically "smart" disks, which do not store the data as blocks, but more elaborated objects. 2.6.30 adds support to these devices in the SCSI layer, as well as the addition of a filesystem (exofs, Extended Object File System) able to use them.

([http://lwn.net/Articles/305740/ LWN's Article], where exofs is still known by its old name, osdfs)

Local Filesystem Caching Infrastructure

FS-Cache is an infrastructure to locally cache remote (or slow) filesystems. It is described in more details in [http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/filesystems/caching/fscache.txt].

Filesystems performance improvement

Shortly after the 2.6.29 release, lots of discussions occurred on LKML about disk I/O (summary available [http://lwn.net/Articles/326471/ at LWN]), and how (and why) they can stall processes for minutes. Some measure have been taken to limit this, like setting the default mount-option to relatime, with 24 hours refresh time ([http://valhenson.livejournal.com/36519.html Detailed article in Valerie Aurora's blog]), and imporving fsync() for ext3.

Integrity Management Architecture

This is an infrastructure which use the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to check that the OS has not been tampered with. ([LWN's article http://lwn.net/Articles/227937/])

Various core changes

• Scheduler
• Memory management

Wi-Fi

Security

• Integrity Management Architecture has been merged.

Networking

Tracing

Filesystems

• ReiserFS
  • Lots of clean-ups.
• Ext3
  • fsync() improvements.
• AFS
  • Now makes use of the FSCache infrastructure.
• NFS
  • Now makes use of the FSCache infrastructure.
• btrfs
  • Stack usage improvements.
• NILFS2
  • The filesystem has been merged for this release. (see above)
• exofs
  • The filesystem has been merged for this release.(see above)

Crypto

DM/MD

Virtualization

Architecture-specific changes

• X86
• ARM
• PPC
• SH
• S390
• Blackfin
• MIPS
• SPARC
• AVR32

Drivers

Storage

• SATA:
• IDE
• SCSI
  • Add OSD support. (see above)

Graphics

Network

Input

Sound

V4L/DVB

USB

HWMON

Watchdog

RTC

HID

MTD

MFD

Power

Serial

Various

Other sources about 2.6.30 kernel

• Heise Online's Kernel Log :

  • [http://www.h-online.com/open/Kernel-Log-Linux-2-6-30-is-taking-shape--/news/113036 Linux 2.6.30 is taking shape]

• Linux Weekly news :

  • [http://lwn.net/Articles/325921/ 2.6.30 merge window, part I]

• CategoryReleases