Linux 4.3 Is Near With Its Polished Intel Skylake Support & More

While there was still a fair amount of code churn this week, if Linus remains comfortable with the state of the kernel, Linux 4.3 will be released this weekend.

There have been dozens of Phoronix articles in recent weeks about the Linux 4.3 kernel features, kernel benchmarks, and more. As a quick recap, here's what most excites me for Linux 4.3:

- The Intel Skylake "Gen9" graphics are finally all stabilized and enabled by default!

- Aside from graphics, other Skylake improvements like finally having Skylake audio support.

- There's initial support for the AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics cards with Fiji HBM GPUs. However, with Linux 4.3 (and still for 4.4) there is no power management support to allow re-clocking to let the graphics card perform at its rated frequency.

- VMware OpenGL 3.3 support for guest VMs.

- Many file-system code fixes.

- SMP scheduler improvements.

If you aren't familiar with the Linux 4.3 kernel already, see last month's Linux 4.3 feature overview. In addition to the numerous Linux 4.3 benchmark articles I've published on Phoronix this month, there's also daily Linux Git benchmarks happening daily for Ubuntu and Fedora over on our automated test farm at LinuxBenchmarking.com.

Stay tuned for the Linux 4.3 announcement and then the Linux 4.4 merge window.