The Changes So Far For The Linux 4.11 Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 27 February 2017 at 10:34 AM EST. 3 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
We are now through week one of two for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window. I've already written a number of news posts this past week covering features I find interesting for Linux 4.11. If you are short on time and behind in your Phoronix reading, here's a quick overview of the material so far for this next major kernel bump.

Among the changes for Linux 4.11 so far include:

- As usual, our favorite, is all of the DRM graphics driver changes and there is plenty this cycle (Direct Rendering Manager, for the uninitiated).

- Some new drivers in staging benefiting the Raspberry Pi.

- Power-saving PCI-E L1 PM sub-state support is now available from the mainline kernel on supported hardware.

- Realtek ALC1220 support, which is the audio codec used by many newer Intel Kabylake and AMD Ryzen motherboards.

- The Serial Device Bus "SERDEV" was merged although drivers aren't going to be using it until at least Linux 4.12.

- A variety of KVM improvements for the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine.

- New ARM SoC and board support.

- Better Turbo Boost Max 3.0 support for newer Intel CPUs capable of boosting for better single-threaded performance.

- OpenRISC optimizations and other improvements although it's not exactly easy/possible to find any OpenRISC hardware on the market yet.

- MD RAID optimizations.

- New input drivers.

- New media drivers.

- A lot of networking updates.

- XFS clean-ups and fixes and EXT4 fixes.

- An assortment of block layer updates.

- PVHv2 support for Xen.

- EFI memory attributes table support.

- Continued tweaking to Intel P-State and other power management updates.

- Expanded Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) support.

- Wacom Intuos Pro support and other driver changes for Wacom tablets.

As usual, I will have my more thorough Linux 4.11 feature overview write-up next weekend when the 4.11 merge window closes and the Linux 4.11-rc1 kernel has been tagged.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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