Linus Torvalds announced yesterday on the Linux kernel mailing list the official release of Linux 2.6.27. This release includes some nice improvements and follows roughly three months after the release of 2.6.26.

This new version adds the ath9k wireless driver from Atheros, the gspca driver, which will significantly extend the number of webcam devices supported on Linux, a new function tracing framework and memory-mapped IO tracing tool that will simplify debugging, support for delayed allocation (a performance improvement) in the Ext4 filesystem, and UBIFS, a new filesystem designed for flash storage devices. Scalability got a boost in this release because of the lockless page cache feature and newly added support for systems with up to 4096 processors.

Additional Ext4 improvements, preemptible spinlocks, and support for syslets are areas of focus for upcoming releases, according to the Linux Foundation's Linux Weather Forecast.

The Kernel Newbies web site has additional details about the release. You can also check out the full changelog and download the patch (13.9 MB compressed) from kernel.org.

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