Linus Torvalds has now released Linux version 2.6.29. A penguin masked Tasmanian devil called Tuz will stand in as Linux mascot for this release, with the aim of drawing attention to the plight of endangered animals.
http://www.h-online.com/open/Steady-gro ... res/112914File System Changes
New in the Linux 2.6.29 main development tree is the 'copy on write' file system Btrfs, dubbed the "next generation file system" for Linux by many major Linux file system developers. Btrfs is, however, far from finished – the kernel developers plan to continue to enhance it and allow it to come to maturity within the framework of kernel development, as happened with Ext4. The latter was incorporated into Linux 2.6.19 in autumn 2006 and has been improved ever since, with the main development phase having recently ended with Linux 2.6.28.
Also new is the latest version 4.0 of SquashFS – a compressed read-only file system long deployed by various Linux distributions on installation or live media booted from USB, CD or DVD. The alternative to Cramfs it is also much used in embedded systems – the kernel documentation on SquashFS provides a detailed explanation of the differences between Cramfs and SquashFS and how the new file system works.
There have also been numerous, mostly minor, improvements, tidying-up and corrections to the Ext4 file system. Thanks to various patches introduced by the Google development team, Ext4 can now run without a journal – some users had been sticking with Ext2 to escape the journalling overhead.
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