[ Developer]

The latest Linux kernel was officially released this week, bringing several new features with the beginning of the recent year. Linux 3.13 can now be compiled and installed freely.

Updates in 3.13 includes nftables, a packet filtering framework meant to take where of iptables. While iptables can sometimes cause trouble during system updates, nftables is anticipated to remove these problems. Nftables is additionally backwards compatible, meaning iptable users can implement it without much work.

Another significant update in 3.13 is Linux block layer scaling. This could help the OS better use the capabilities of newer hardware by allowing millions of IO requests per second. Chiefly this could help Linux better profit from the rate of SSD drives.

Optimization for AMD’s Radeon GPUs has also been added in 3.13. Power management for more Radeon devices is now supported and is now the default for some devices. Support for the Radeon R9 290X has also been added.

In addition to those larger updates, 3.13 contains many other features and enhancements. Support for capping device power consumption, NFC payments, and Intel’s Many Integrated Core multiprocessor architecture was added. Performance for multiprocessors using non-uniform memory access (NUMA) have been improved, as has the performance of the Squashfs filesystem. Hugepage workloads should now have improved page table access through page table access scaling. TCP Fast Open optimization is now enabled by default and network transport layer computation rates can now be capped.

Linux 3.13 Kernel Officially Released 58 mins ago