So after 20 years and 39 major releases Linus Torvalds announces a 3.0.0 RC1 version after the 2.6 version. There was a lot of consideration for going to the 2.8 version but Linus chose 3.0.0 RC1 for this release as he thinks it’s time to end the 2.6 kernel series. You can read his official announcement here.
As Linus discusses in his announcement, there are no really big changes in Linux 3.0 RC1 but a lot of bug fixes. It also includes Microsoft Kinect Linux driver, support for cleancache, various open source graphics drivers update, optimizations for Intel platforms (Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge) as well as AMD’s Fusion APUs.
Linux 3.0.0 RC1 will loose some of the features like support for Reiser4 file-system, the VIA KMS/DRM driver, an accelerated Poulsbo / PowerVR DRM driver, multi-GPU rendering and other items.
Linus says the 3.0.0 is just about time based renumbering Linux has been doing for some time and isn’t about a major upgrade.
Here’s the commitdiff on Linux 3.0.0 RC1
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=summary
And here’s the official announcement by Linus Torvalds on Linux 3.0.0 RC1 lkml.org.
