Linus Torvalds has announced the release of a new version of the Linux Kernel. Writing in his blog Torvalds said that the final 3.3 is out after some last minute changes.

He admits that the final update is pretty boring. “The diffstat from -rc7 is dominated by the arch/tile defconfig changes, the rest is pretty small, although there are changes spread out in various subsystem s(drivers, filesystem, networking, perf tools),” he said.

The Intel graphics driver in Linux 3.3 has been modified to avoid the deepest sleep state offered by Intel's RC6 GPU power saving feature. This makes Linux 3.3 work better with the graphics cores used in Intel's current Sandy Bridge generation of processors.

The DRM/KMS driver for NVIDIA graphics chips will support audio output via HDMI on NVA3 (aka GT215) and later graphics chips (1, 2, 3, 4). These are used on graphics cards such as the GeForce GT 240, 320 and 335M.

The Radeon DRM/KMS driver for AMD graphics chips now supports HDMI audio output on Evergreen chips.  The DRM/KMS graphics driver for Intel's GMA500, GMA600 and GMA3600 graphics cores has been merged into the DRM subsystem. The kernel developers have added an Ethernet teaming driver that combines multiple Ethernet devices into one virtual device.

Linux 3.3 includes the kernel components that are required for the Open vSwitch. This multi-layer virtual switch can operate on layers 2, 3 or 4 and was specially developed for virtualisation.

The kernel now includes a driver for NVMe – Non-Volatile Memory Express. This is a standard interface defined a year ago for access to SSDs connected via PCI or PCIe.