Linux 4.7 Brings A Plethora Of New Features: AMD Polaris, ARM ASpeed, SGI UV4, Schedutil
Processors / Platforms:
- A lot of new ARM platform support including the first mainline LG ARM platform (LG1312), ASpeed platform support that's widely used by baseboard management controllers, ARM's OXNAS-MPS2 prototyping platform, and other new SoC support. There's also DT additions for the Google Pixel C, ODROID C2, first-generation Amazon Kindle Fire, and GeekBox.
- Accumulated power reporting for AMD Carrizo APUs and newer.
- KVM SVM AVIC support for lowering the interrupt overhead of AMD x86 virtualization and thereby offering better AMD KVM virtualization performance for guests.
- SGI Ultravioleet UV4 platform support for this unreleased hardware.
- The Schedutil governor was added as the first new ACPI CPUFreq governor in a while and it's interesting in that it makes use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data when determining performance state/frequency changes. There is already my Linux 4.7 CPUFreq Schedutil Testing vs. P-State testing.
- Hibernate / suspend-to-disk for ARM64 was wired up at the architecture level.
- PMC driver for Intel Core SoCs.
Disks / File-Systems:
- The core block code now supports async discard.
- Many EXT4 bug fixes.
- Yep, bug fixes and improvements too for XFS.
- ZAC / shingled magnetic recording support with Zone ATA Command support and related work.