With the release of Linux 2.6.34-rc1 on Monday night, Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window of Linux 2.6.34 – only 12 days after releasing Linux 2.6.33. While Torvalds usually allows at least two weeks at the beginning of each development cycle for integrating the most important new features, he had already indicated that the current first phase would be shorter in an attempt to get subsystem maintainers out of the habit of submitting their changes at the last minute.

The developers made numerous further changes to the graphics driver code. Among the new additions is a KMS graphics driver for Radeon 5000 graphics cards and improved support of the power-saving mechanisms in modern Radeon graphics chips. Major restructuring measures in the kernel's Nouveau driver have changed the API; this has made older Nouveau drivers for X.org incompatible with the new kernel. The Nouveau code can now generate the firmware for recent graphics chips itself and no longer requires the external ctxprogs that caused discussions when Nouveau was first integrated.

In notebooks equipped with chip-set graphics as well as a separate graphics chip, the kernel can now switch between the two graphics systems.

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