Linux 3.12 [https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/11/3/160 was released on November 2, 2013]
Summary: ![/!\](/moin_static199/memodump/img/alert.png "/!\"){kind=small}
This page is being written. Sorry for the delay
Other news sites that track the changes of this release: LWN [https://lwn.net/Articles/565715/ part 1], [https://lwn.net/Articles/566122/ part 2], [https://lwn.net/Articles/566546/ part 3]
1. Prominent features
1.1. Offline data deduplication support in Btrfs
The Btrfs filesystem has gained support for offline data deduplication. Deduplication consists in removing copies of repeated data in the filesystem, since the data is the same only one copy is neccesary. In some particular workloads, like virtualization VMs -which often contain similar copies of operating systems- the gains can be enormous. By "offline", it means that the deduplication process is done when the file system is mounted and running, but the deduplication process is not done automatically as processes write data, but rather it's triggered by userspace software at a time controlled by the system administrator.
Gabriel de Perthuis also has a branch in his bedup deduplication tool which works against this support. The branch can be found at: https://github.com/g2p/bedup/tree/wip/dedup-syscall
The author of the deduplication support, Mark Fasheh, has also written an sample deduplication tool, duperemove, which can be found here: https://github.com/markfasheh/duperemove
Code: [http://git.kernel.org/linus/416161db9b63e353a8fb79d1369779175102fca1 commit]
1.2. DOCUMENT BEING REDACTED RIGHT NOW, MORE FEATURES WILL BE ADDED
2. Drivers and architectures
All the driver and architecture-specific changes can be found in the [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.12-DriversArch Linux_3.12-DriversArch page]
3. Core
4. Memory management
5. Block layer
6. File systems
7. Networking
8. Crypto
9. Virtualization
10. Security