The Linux Ninja

Earlier  this evening, Linus Torvalds announced the availability of the 2.6.29 version of the Linux kernel.

This version contains many changes including changing the mascot to Tuz the Tasmanian Devil in an effort to bring awareness to  and raise money for the plight of tasmanian devils in Australia during the 2009 linux.conf.au conference. Tasmanian devils are endangered and are currently afflicted with a form of communicable cancer.

Other major changes include the inclusion of the Btrfs filesystem. This filesystem is a “next-gen filesystem” that tries to “focus on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration”, but it is still in the development phase. Ext4 also received some updates and SquashFS, primarily used in embedded devices, also enters the mainline kernel. Another major addition is an 802.17 WiMax stack, eCryptfs filename encryption, and many updated and new hardware drivers.
As always new kernel versions can be downloaded from kernel.org and the full changelog can be found here.