Linux kernel version 4.2 released -- 24th anniversary edition
Linus has been busy toiling away on the next version of the Linux kernel, and now version 4.2 has finally been released. It brings some goodies worth having. The ChaCha20 stream cipher and the Poly1305 authenticator (see RFC 7539) are supported, and there's a new RSA implementation. The default crypto random number generator API is now DRBG. LinuxPlanet notes that there's support for security module stacking. Linux 4.2 uses CPU execution jitter to help seed its improved random number generator, a feature called "jitter entropy RNG" on the basis that sushi should be called "cold dead fish".
The release of 4.2 comes just a few days after the 24th birthday of Linux, announced on newsgroup comp.os.minix. It isn't an overstatement to say that the modern world runs on Linux. If you look around you, almost everything is running on Linux -- from your home router to stock exchanges. Thanks to Linux, open source has become a phenomenon that is fast becoming a norm in the enterprise and consumer segments. Fierce competitors like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, Red Hat, SUSE are all working together to make open source software even better.
The release of 4.2 comes just a few days after the 24th birthday of Linux, announced on newsgroup comp.os.minix. It isn't an overstatement to say that the modern world runs on Linux. If you look around you, almost everything is running on Linux -- from your home router to stock exchanges. Thanks to Linux, open source has become a phenomenon that is fast becoming a norm in the enterprise and consumer segments. Fierce competitors like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, Red Hat, SUSE are all working together to make open source software even better.