The New & Improved Features Of The Linux 4.19 Kernel
The Linux 4.19-rc1 kernel is expected to be released today and with that marks the end of feature development on this next kernel version. Here is a look at the new and improved features to be found in Linux 4.19.
Linux 4.19 has been an interesting cycle and was fairly eventful but some problematic pull requests led Linus Torvalds to calling it a horrible merge window From our original reporting over the past two weeks, highlights of the Linux 4.19 kernel include:
Display / Graphics:
- The VKMS DRM driver was merged for virtual kernel mode-setting and may be of use moving forward to some headless systems.
- The USB Type-C display mode alternate driver was merged to the mainline kernel for stepping up the DP Type-C support, but more work on integrating with the DRM drivers is still being tackled.
- Initial support for the Qualcomm Adreno 600 series hardware.
- Continued work on bringing up the Intel Icelake "Gen 11" graphics.
- Raven Ridge "stutter mode" support, JPEG VCN engine support, GFXOFF, and AMDKFD compute driver support for these latest AMD Zen+GFX9 APUs.
- Deferred console takeover support for FBDEV.
- Various other DRM improvements.
Processors:
- AMD Threadripper 2 temperature monitoring is now correct and this should also be back-ported to stable kernel series.
- The lazy TLB mode is lazier for some small possible performance enhancements.
- A kernel build-time option to indicate if you trust the CPU's hardware random number generator but by default will assume your CPU HWRNG is not trustworthy.
- The RISC-V code is beginning to work with user-space bits though this open-source processor ISA still has a long road ahead.
- Some minor work on OpenRISC.
- More Spectre mitigation work for IBM POWER processors as well as continued x86 Spectre updates and even some for IBM s390 too.
- "A bunch of good stuff" for 64-bit ARM.