After a long delay due to kernel.org being hacked in August 2011, Linux 3.2 has finally been released. It’s a whopper of a release with optimizations and tweaks in nearly every facet of the OS; here’s the rundown of what’s new inside and why you want to upgrade to it.

First and foremost, the Intel GPU (graphics processing unit) DRM/KMS driver has been optimized to use Intel’s RC6 graphics power-saving feature. In a nutshell, that means that battery life on Ubuntu laptops is going to get a lot better with the Precise Pangolin (12.04) release of Ubuntu. DRM (the Direct Rendering Manager) and KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) aren’t things that a general or even hardcore user needs to concern themselves with, but, basically, it’s the pieces of the graphics puzzle that deal with handling the memory management of the drawing, backgrounding and re-drawing of applications as you minimize and switch between applications. The actual power savings are going to differ from machine to machine, but every machine should see improvement.

Canonical’s Ubuntu has taken this power saving a step further with its PMUtils crowdsourcing initiative. If you are a confident command line interface Linux user, please go take part. Your data will help battery management everywhere.

Another improvement to the 3.2 kernel is in the networking TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) stack. The WiFi drivers have been improved, and PRR (Proportional Rate Reduction) support has been introduced to the kernel. What this means is that your browsing experience will be faster as transmission rates will be adjusted in a more timely fashion to recover from throttling and other bottlenecks you may encounter along the way to your destination. File transfers should see the same efficiency boost, speed-wise.

Some filesystem optimizations have been included too, designed to make Linux more scalable in large storage configurations, especially on enterprise systems. Reliability and ease-of-management options are included, as well as larger allocation blocks in the EXT4 filesystem to speed up disk access for sharing files and drives across operating systems like Windows via Samba. If you run a Linux file server at home or in the workplace, this is welcome news.

Finally, it should be mentioned that code has been introduced to assist with system throttling when writing large amounts of data to slow drives, making the user experience snappier when you have to move large amounts of data to and from drives or removable media. Syncing your MP3 device shouldn’t reduce your machine to a stuttering crawl so much with the enhancements.

There are many more optimizations coming with the 3.2 kernel that deal with large-scale servers and storage solutions (thin provisioning and the Btrfs filesystem to name a couple) that aren’t mentioned here, as well as a number of tweaks and services that are outside the scope of desktop or small business computing. The information above is what you need to know as a general or fairly hardcore Linux user.

Want to try it out now? You don’t need to wait until an official release. Ubuntu’s 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) is available now and comes with the 3.2 kernel; download the (beta) daily build. If you just want to upgrade your existing system to 12.04, just open a terminal and type out “sudo do-release-upgrade -d”. That will grab the proper libraries and run through installation for you. Alternately, if you like using a nice GUI with your upgrades, you can type “sudo update-manager -d” and you will see that an upgrade is available to you (pictured right).

All in all, this is one of the larger kernel improvements that we’ve seen, with many improvements under the hood. Have you upgraded to the 3.2 kernel? What’s your experience been?

Read the complete Linux 3.2 changelog