Looking Forward To The Linux 4.10 Kernel

The Linux 4.9 kernel will be officially released in about three weeks but there is already new features/functionality to get excited about for Linux 4.10.

From the Phoronix perspective, here is what has been on our radar already as changes for Linux 4.10 for our areas of interest in the kernel:

- The start of "Make WiFi Fast" improvements are expected to begin arriving with 4.10.

- Hopefully we'll finally see merged the Turbo Boost Max 3.0 support.

- Generic governors support for Intel P-State is a likely candidate.

- Btrfs is expected to have more internal changes.

- F2FS has been working on native multi-device support.

- Better power management and a new VM manager for AMDGPU. But no, there isn't CIK/SI support by default nor DAL.

- Long-awaited Nouveau improvements including the initial "boost" support, the Nouveau LED driver, GP102 support, and also exciting is initial atomic mode-setting support and DP MST (DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport) handling with big changes to the Nouveau KMS code.

- Lots of churn to the Intel DRM driver, as usual, especially continued work for Gen9 and later.

- The ZTE XZ DRM driver is going to be added.

- Allwinner A31 support in its DRM display driver.

- Exposing the EFI frame-buffer configuration to display custom status strings during firmware updates.

Plus many other changes are to come with Linux 4.10. Most of our early 4.10 coverage is obviously about the DRM/graphics improvements but once the Linux 4.10 merge window opens in December, there will be my usual plethora of coverage of all the interesting kernel changes followed of course by benchmarks.