What is new in Linux 3.0
Linus Torvalds, the Lead Developer on the Linux from the Linux Foundation write in a message about the new version and what is coming in this version.
In a response on the mailing group, Linus
wrote, that there may not be anything new in Linux 3.0.
From his message:
So what are the big changes?
NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We've been doing time-based releases for many years
now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one ("20 years") instead.
Alright, jokes aside, Linux 3.0 does have some new features including Btrfs data scrubbing and automatic defragmentation, XEN Dom0 support, unprivileged ICMP_ECHO, wake on WLAN, Berkeley Packet Filter JIT filtering, a memcached-like system for the page cache, a sendmmsg() syscall that batches sendmsg() calls and setns(), a syscall that allows better handling of light virtualization systems such as containers. New hardware support has been added: for example, Microsoft Kinect, AMD Llano Fusion APUs, Intel iwlwifi 105 and 135, Intel C600 serial-attached-scsi controller, Ralink RT5370 USB, several Realtek RTL81xx devices or the Apple iSight webcam. Many other drivers and small improvements have been added.
You may read more details about these features
here.