Linux 4.7 Brings A Plethora Of New Features: AMD Polaris, ARM ASpeed, SGI UV4, Schedutil

After a very exciting past two weeks, the merge window for Linux 4.7 is expected to close today. This was an action-packed merge window with a ton of new code being introduced. While I've already written dozens of posts on Phoronix about the changes that got me excited, here's my usual kernel feature overview. Here's a look at what's coming for Linux 4.7.

Linux 4.7-rc1 is expected for release today while Linux 4.7.0 will be officially released at the end of July or early August. Before getting to this lengthy feature list, if you find all of this information useful that I collect via scouring Git and the mailing list constantly, please consider showing your appreciate via subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip. As frequently pointed out by Phoronix readers, my kernel feature overview lists commonly end up getting copied by others based upon the occasional function/IC/driver misspellings getting copied over to other places as well as hints in the URL utm_source, etc. Anyhow, thanks for supporting and for those that appreciate this original reporting, here are the many new features for Linux 4.7 include:

Graphics:

As usual, our favorite subsystem, and another heavy cycle of changes:

- There's a new HiSilicon Kirin DRM driver.

- New Mediatek DRM display driver.

- New ARC PGU DRM driver.

- The fourth and final new DRM driver for Linux 4.7 is an Allwinner A13 display driver.

- The AMDGPU DRM driver has initial Polaris support, a.k.a. support for AMD's soon-to-launch GPUs. It's wonderful to see AMD finally has launch-day support ready in open-source, albeit it's in Git form and won't be for a while before this Polaris support is in released, stable versions of the Linux kernel, Mesa, and friends.

- AMDGPU also has some performance improvements with GPUVM / scheduler / clock / PowerPlay optimizations, support for async page-flipping, and other new features. The recently-published AMDGPU OverDrive and DAL features aren't coming now until Linux 4.8.

- A lot of Intel DRM work from code refactoring to Intel color manager support, more atomic coding, and other new hardware improvements.

- DisplayPort++ dongle detection for HDMI/DVI adapters using DisplayPort.

- The Nouveau DRM for open-source NVIDIA support now has GM108 Maxwell support, power sensor improvements, and other changes. The Nouveau Boost support didn't land for Linux 4.7 nor is there any Pascal mode-setting support. Though I did hear just a few days ago that NVIDIA did send out a GeForce GTX 1080 to Ben Skeggs for working on Nouveau Pascal support in the months ahead.

- Raspberry Pi's VC4 DRM driver now has render node and gamma ramp support as well as DPI panel support.

- Other changes as part of the massive DRM pull request. The DRM code adds around 80,000 lines of new code to the Linux kernel alone, in large part due to the AMDGPU Polaris additions.