Gentlemen, start your compilers.  On July 13, 2008, Linux 2.6.26 was given the green light, and features an impressive list of changes.  Go ahead and download it at the kernel archives.  And, if you have the nerve, see the list of commits.

There are several new features that I consider worthy of particular mention.  First of all, there’s the addition of a V4L/DVB driver that adds support for USB Video Class devices; this means that most USB webcams, video cameras, video capture cards, etc. will now work fine with Linux.

One of the more controversial changes is the addition of a kernel debugger, or KGDB.  Linus Torvalds has been notoriously against kernel debuggers, but I guess in the end, KGDB was good enough to be merged.

KVM, or the kernel virtualization layer, has been ported to more architectures; IA64, S390, and PPC.

Barriers have been enabled by default in ext4.  This improves data integrity, as it gives a mechanism for ensuring that the transaction information has been written to the filesystem journal before the commit record can be written, along with the rest of the write operation.  However, Andrew Morton stated that it can cause a 30% slowdown, and thus the reason that up to now it hasn’t been enabled by default on ext3 or ext4.  The situation may not be as severe for ext4, however, as the barrier process for it is less time-consuming than it is for ext3.

In addition, support for the mesh networking draft has been implemented, which will allow for interesting networking clouds, a lá OLPC.