Last week brought the arrival of a new Linux kernel, version 2.6.33. With it, came quite a few changes likely to interest to device developers. So, here is a breakdown of the most significant mobile/embedded updates to come in the latest kernel.

Now that Linus Torvalds is done rewiring part of his house, he has put out the Linux 2.6.33 kernel release. This update to the Linux kernel that's coming three months after the release of Linux 2.6.32 delivers the Nouveau DRM GPU code in the staging area, many Radeon KMS improvements and it has left the staging area, the new VMware DRM, and much more.

The next version of Linux is not only the first to offer the Nouveau KMS graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware, it also comes with a multitude of improvements for the two AMD/ATI and Intel graphics drivers which support Kernel-based Mode Setting (KMS).

Linus has released the 2.6.33-rc1 prepatch, closing the merge window for this development cycle. This kernel has a few features which will shake things up, with dynamic tracing being near the top as far as I am concerned. But, perhaps, the most interesting addition is one that almost nobody expected: a reverse-engineered driver for NVIDIA graphics chipsets called “Nouveau.”

Linus Torvalds has merged the kernel code for the GeForce-compatible nouveau open source graphics driver as a staging driver into the Linux main development tree – from which kernel version 2.6.33 will emerge in around two and a half months.

David Airlie has just called upon Linus Torvalds to pull in the latest DRM patches for inclusion into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. The Direct Rendering Manager improvements in this next kernel release will be particularly interesting.