As Linux Kernel 3.7 releases, work doesn’t stop on Linux, and the upcoming 3.8 release seems to be an interesting one indeed. One major new feature coming in 3.8 is full support for CPU-hotplugging. This means what you might expect, that in a running Linux system it is possible to turn on or off CPUs connected to the system, and if supported by your hardware even physically unplug such CPUs. This in itself is not new to the Linux kernel, and has been around since Linux 2.6.14. What is new however is that now even the first CPU of the system CPU0 can be removed, while earlier this was not possible. This makes it possible to completely change all the CPUs of a multi-CPU system without rebooting. Currently though, this is not possible, and not supported; the new feature itself only supports Intel CPUs currently and is turned off by default. Another major change is actually a removal. The Linux kernel will no longer support the
old Intel 80386 platform as of the 3.8. The 80386 line of processors started as far back as 1985, and has been obsolete for quite a long time. It was, however, used for embedded systems for well after that and finally stopped production in 2007. There will of course be a slew of other minor but important improvements in this release, such as improved support for the new 64-bit ARM architecture, improvements to Btrfs and XFS filesystem support, improvements to ACPI etc.
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