Linux 3.9 Released

hypnosec writes "After a week's delay Linux 3.9 has finally been made available by Linus Torvalds. Last week Torvalds released the rc8 stating that he wasn't 'comfy' releasing the final version yet and that 'another week won't hurt.' Torvalds noted in this week's announcement that last week had been very quiet as there were not many commits and the ones which were there were 'really tiny' so he went ahead with the release of Linux 3.9."

Comments

Interesting but...

[hcs_$reboot]

it's not in TFS, not in TFA... what's new in 3.9?

on dm-cache, bcache, etc

[bill_mcgonigle]

Thanks for the link. I chased down the dm-cache stuff a bit, looking at it vs. bcache, which we'll see in June, probably. The primary differences seem to be that dm-cache is a bit more generic and easier to work with and it allows some manual allocation of the different types of disk data to be cached, while bcache seems to be targeting SSD's specifically, with wear-leveling sensitive write patterns, use of TRIM, and in-kernel code to validate the cache drives for preventing stupid user tricks.

EnhanceIO might also be targeting 3.10, which is a descendant of flashcache, which uses the layered device approach, while dm-cache and bcache are side-loaded. EnhanceIO uses udev rather than in-kernel code to prevent the stupid user tricks. I got the sense that 3.10 was possible for EnhanceIO but not as certain as bcache.

I'm current using flashcache on my non-ZFS systems; it looks like I'll be waiting for 3.10 and use bcache for my next upgrade.