#pragma section-numbers on
#pragma keywords Linux, kernel, operating system, changes, changelog, file system, Linus Torvalds, open source, device drivers
#pragma description Summary of the changes and new features merged in the Linux kernel during the 3.12 development cycle


Linux 3.12 [https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/11/3/160 was released on November 2, 2013]



'''Summary''': /!\ /!\ /!\ 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]



[[TableOfContents()]]
= Prominent features =

== 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]

== DOCUMENT BEING REDACTED RIGHT NOW, MORE FEATURES WILL BE ADDED ==

= 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]

= Core =
= Memory management =
= Block layer =
= File systems =
= Networking =
= Crypto =
= Virtualization =
= Security =
= Tracing/perf =