An Early Look Ahead At The Linux 4.7 Features Expected For The Merge Window

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 15 May 2016 at 12:11 PM EDT. 1 Comment
LINUX KERNEL
With Linux 4.6 expected today, here's a look at some of the features we can hope to see merged over the next two weeks once the Linux 4.7 merge window opens.

These items are listed in no particular order and are just some of the -next items I've been covering up to this point with items of interest to me (of course, mostly graphics related and other interesting hardware topics) and where they should be landing in Linux 4.7 unless any last minute issues arise or Linus Torvalds opts to not honor the pull requests.

- The new CPUFreq scaling governor "schedutil" that makes use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data for making smarter choices about changing the frequency / performance state.

- There's a new MediaTek DRM driver for display purposes.

- A HiSilicon Kirin DRM driver was also added.

- The ARC PGU DRM driver is also a new addition.

- Yet another new addition is an Allwinner DRM driver! But don't get your hopes up about seeing a fully open Allwinner Linux graphics stack supported by the company.

- Many AMDGPU improvements including initial support for soon-to-launch Polaris graphics cards. There are also performance improvements in AMDGPU and even some Radeon DRM performance improvements.

- The usual smothering of Intel DRM driver updates. One of the main Intel additions for Linux 4.7 is to be color manager support.

- More fighting against Bufferbloat in the networking space.

- Render nodes and gamma ramp support for the Raspberry Pi driver along with DPI panel support for the VC4 DRM.

- EFI changes including more capsule update work and an EFI bootloader control driver.

There will be a whole lot more coming over the Linux 4.7 merge window's two week period once Linux 4.6 is released. So make sure you stay tuned to your daily reading of Phoronix! Go for premium if you want to help support the work with 100+ hour work weeks while battling burnout while as a premium member you get to see the site ad-free and multi-page articles on a single page and more.
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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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