Linux 3.10 was released by Linus Torvalds last night, bringing with it a new method of SSD caching and some upgrades to the Radeon graphics driver. "This release has been pretty typical and not particularly prone to problems," Torvalds wrote in his e-mail announcing the release. "No major new subsystems this time around, although there are individual new features."
As you may recall, Linux 3.9 (released in April) included an experimental feature called dm-cache that allows SSDs to act as caches for other storage devices. An additional SSD caching technology known as Bcache was also in the works for more than a year and has now merged into the Linux kernel with the newly released 3.10.
"Linux 3.10 will include the 'block-layer cache' Bcache, which can be used to configure one disk as a cache for another disk; a fast SSD, for example, could be used as a cache for a slower hard drive with more capacity," H-Online editor Thorsten Leemhuis wrote in his thorough roundup of the new kernel version."This kind of SSD cache can speed up access to frequently read data and take on write requests until a quieter moment when they can be written to the slower disk."
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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com
