Kernel and Glibc Updates

There are interesting progress on -Current as of today. Patrick has finally included glibc 2.17 into current, so this will likely be the version used in next Slackware release. Glibc itself has been released for some time, but it took a while to get merged into -Current just because Pat wanted to make sure it works as he intended. The good news is that it is now.

Another interesting update is the default kernel stock being used in Slackware is now lifted to 3.7.10. It's not the latest stable kernel and definitely it's EOL'ed by Greg K.H, the -Stable kernel maintainer, but it's not a permanent version yet. There's still a possibility of having an upgraded kernel in the future if the problem has been fixed (broken drivers).

Some note on the new kernel:
- USB host and usb-storage drivers are now modular in both kernel (huge and generic)
- New brcmsmac driver for Broadcom will overtake the cards that were previously supported by b43 drivers. Please change it to brcmsmac if you are having trouble with WiFI card after upgrading to this kernel
- Initial UEFI support in the form of a bootable USB image called efiboot.img

Emacs is now upgraded to 24.3, but syslinux is downgraded to 4.06 after 5.01 having a problem that prevents extra parameters being passed to the kernel during boot time.