The New Features So Far For The Linux 4.12 Kernel

We are through week one of two for the Linux 4.12 kernel merge window. It's been a busy first week of 4.12, so for your viewing pleasure this weekend is a recap of some of the changes that landed over the past seven days.

Among the features so far for Linux 4.12 are:

- The huge DRM pull consisting of initial Radeon RX Vega support (but no display capabilities), Intel atomic mode-setting by default, GeForce GTX 1000 Pascal acceleration in Nouveau, and a whole lot more amounting to nearly half a million lines of code.

- The DRM/FreeDesktop.org code of conduct was added to the tree.

- New I/O schedulers: the long-standing BFQ was finally merged as well as Facebook's Kyber.

- There's now a USB Type-C port manager.

- More POWER9 enablement and Power 64-bit CPUs now have access up to 512TB of virtual address space.

- A variety of ARM64 updates.

- A lot of new staging code.

- XFS support for GETFSMAP.

- Intel RealSense SR300 support.

- Early work towards Linux kernel lockdown mode under UEFI Secure Boot to avoid touching hardware settings.

- 9pfs front-end driver for Xen.

- A number of Intel laptop driver improvements.

- More Intel work on 5-level paging to expand the amount of physical/virtual address space for future Intel CPUs.

- Bluetooth support for the Intel Edison.

- A number of sound driver fixes.

- Faster livepatching in the form of quicker module loading for select out-of-tree modules.

- MD RAID optimizations.

- P-State and Schedutil updates.

- Intel Memory Bandwidth Allocation support.

- KASLR by default for x86 systems in the name of security.

- Dropping the AVR32 architecture from the mainline kernel.

That's what I have covered in the past week. There still are some more interesting pull requests expected in the next week, so stay tuned! Expect a number of early Linux 4.12 benchmarks once 4.12-rc1 has been tagged next weekend.