Linux Kernel 4.14 is here, and it has some promising features!
Last Sunday, Linus Torvalds announced the release of the latest Linux 4.14 kernel. Although the release was made with a lack of fanfare(Linus' s usual way), the aftermath of the release has raised a lot of speculation among the Linux users.
He opened by saying “ it is probably worth pointing out how the 0day robot has been getting even better (it was very useful before, but Fengguang has been working on making it even better, and reporting the problems it has found).” Said robot is an automated vulnerability-checker that scours kernel code for issues. With version 4.14 slated to be the next kernel version to receive Long Term Support, and that support now running for six years instead of two, a more secure release will be widely welcome.
Also in version 4.14 you' ll find: Heterogeneous Memory Management, which will allow GPUs to access an application' s memory space. The addition should make Linux a far better platform for GPU-intensive applications like machine learning No kernel firmware in the tree, as the powers that be feel it doesn' t belong there Improvements from Red Hat to make Linux a better Hyper-V guest Preparation for Intel' s forthcoming Cannonlake processors A vibrator driver. No. Not that sort of vibrator! This one' s for the buzzer in Motorola' s forthcoming Droid 4 phone
That changes everything for Linux device developers. As Google senior staff engineer Iliyan Malchev recently said, " All Android devices [...] are based of the LTS kernel. The problem with LTS is it' s only two years. And so, by the time the first devices on a SoC [System on a Chip] hit the market, you have maybe a year, if you' re lucky, of LTS support. And, if you' re not, it' s over." Now, Internet of Things (IoT), smartphone, and embedded Linux device developers can build gear knowing that it' s operating system will be supported until 2023.
Linus also shared an interesting information on how the Kernel had to undergo a last minute change which involved the reverting of the code that showed a good MHz value in /proc/cpuinfo even for the modern ' CPU picks frequency dynamically' case. Since it was considered expensive when tens or hundreds of CPU cores were to be in picture, it was changed.
Torvalds has declared this release “ painful” and urged kernel devs to get their pull releases for version 4.15 in sooner rather than latter. Stragglers will be told “ tough luck, you were late to the merge window, and I felt more like being out in the sun than taking your second-week pull request.”
- New sound hardware support.
- The usual variety of HID updates.
- Many new media drivers.
- A PWM-controlled vibrator driver that initially will be used by the Droid 4.
Other:
- Linux 4.14 has done away with in-tree kernel firmware to better enforce that firmware blobs belong in Linux-firmware.git.
- Various Btrfs fixes and prep work for merging new features in the next cycles.
- EXT4 scalability improvements are yielding performance improvements for some users.
- XFS has received more fixes.
- CFQ and BFQ updates for these I/O schedulers.
- F2FS tuning for Android.
- AMD Secure Memory Encryption has landed in supporting this new memory encryption tech for AMD EPYC processors.
- AMD Secure Processor support has seen some reworks and improvements for crypto, etc.
- Intel Cache Quality Monitoring code was rewritten.
- More Intel P-State improvements and other CPUfreq work.
- ARM64 improvements while Raspberry Pi Zero W, Banana Pi, and many other new board support can be found with the mainline 4.14 kernel.
- SPARC CPU improvements, including M7/M8 CPU optimizations.
- Xen and KVM updates as well as optimizations for Microsoft Hyper-V.
- Various MIPS updates while also retiring R6000 series support.
Btrfs Zstd compression support
HDMI CEC support for Raspberry Pi
Secure memory encryption for AMD EPYC processors
ASUS T100 touchpad support
Heterogeneous Memory Management
AMDGPU DRM Vega improvements
Better support for Ryzen processors
- On the compute side, AMDKFD has been upstreaming more patches.
- Nouveau DRM updates for open-source NVIDIA include GP108 / GT 1030 mode-setting support but no hardware acceleration for this chip yet due to being blocked by signed firmware images.
- Intel's DRM driver has been working on more Cannonlake "Gen 10" graphics enablement.
- HDMI CEC support for Raspberry Pi as well as in the Allwinner Sunxi driver.
- Power management improvements for Freedreno MSM.
- Other DRM subsystem updates.
- Various FBDEV improvements.