The New Changes & Features Of The Linux 4.13 Kernel
With Linux 4.13-rc1 having been released, here's my original look at the new features coming for the Linux 4.13 kernel and the other changes merged over the past two weeks of this new cycle.
Highlights of Linux 4.13 that caught my attention in monitoring Git and the mailing list includes:
DRM / Graphics:
- Intel Cannonlake support in its initial. preliminary hardware state. There is also initial Intel Coffeelake support for these next-gen successors to Kabylake. Expect the Cannonlake/Coffeelake support to mature over the next few cycles.
- AMD Raven Ridge support is new on the AMDGPU DRM side as well as many fixes for Vega. But with Raven / Vega, there still is no display support on Linux 4.13 as the DC/DAL code has yet to be merged.
- DRM synchronization object support was merged to core DRM.
- AMDGPU has KIQ support for compute rings, SR-IOV improvements, and many other fixes to its open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver.
- Nouveau for open-source NVIDIA has HDMI 3D / stereoscopic support.
- The pl111 display controller code was merged after sitting around for years.
New Subsystems / Buses:
- A new DMA mapping subsystem.
- The MUX subsystem was merged.
- There's also now a UUID subsystem for unifying more kernel code around UUID/GUID handling.
- Windows Management Instrumentation has evolved into its own bus.
File-Systems / Storage:
- F2FS now supports statx for enhanced file information via this new syscall.
- Btrfs also now supports statx.
- EXT4 now supports a "largedir" feature to allow around two billion entires in a directory rather than the previous limitation around ten million.
- XFS now supports SEEK_HOLE and SEEK_DATA.
- UBIFS now has statx support as well as encryption improvements/fixes.
- The DM code now handles SMR/zoned devices.
- Write hints for NVMe that should allow for better performance.
Processors:
- Improved cpu_cooling integration with CPUFreq.
- Possible performance improvements for Xen Linux guests.
- Routine updates around KVM.
- The usual smothering of new ARM hardware support including some new SoCs and various SBCs like the LeMaker Guitar Board, Bubblegum 96, and BeagleBone Blue.
Hardware:
- New HID hardware support.
- New input drivers.
- Many PCI updates.
- New audio hardware support, including Realtek ALC215 / ALC285 / ALC289 support.
- Hwmon updates but sadly no Zen/Ryzen thermal driver yet.
Other:
- Improvements to the schedulers.
- Canonical has finally mainlined a lot of their AppArmor changes.
- The usual churn in the staging area.
Did I miss anything? There were also some features not merged for Linux 4.13.
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