Linux Kernel 3.12 in its stable release has been made available recently which comes with new features and optimizations. Here are some of them taken from Phoronix:
- Improved Dynamic Power Management support for newer Radeon GPUs and other changes after the Radeon DPM feature was merged in Linux 3.11
- A Snapdragon KMS/DRM driver from the Freedreno project for the Qualcomm Adreno.
- Runtime GPU power management for NVIDIA Optimus laptops to be able to dynamically power on/off secondary GPUs.
- Experimental support for DRM render nodes.
- AMD Berlin APU support for the first HSA server APU.
- Intel Haswell graphics improvements with eLLC DRAM support now enabled for the systems with Iris Pro 5200 graphics bearing dedicated memory for graphics.
- Staging driver updates.
- Sound driver work.
- EXT4 gained new features of aggressive extent caching and better recovery.
- F2FS file-system improvements.
- Lenovo Ideapad Slidebar support.
- XFS file-system improvements.
- Btrfs file-system performance improvements.
Kernel 3.12 Installation
To install kernel 3.12 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint, enter these commands:
cd /tmp
wget http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47950494/upubuntu/kernel-3.12 -O kernel-3.12
chmod +x kernel-3.12
sudo sh kernel-3.12
sudo reboot
To uninstall kernel 3.12, run this command:
sudo apt-get purge linux-image-3.12*