Linux 4.15 Is Off To A Busy Start

As expected, the Linux 4.15 merge window is proving to be very action-packed with a lot of new code being queued for this next kernel release and we are less than 48 hours into this two week cycle.

Linux 4.15 is already proving to be exciting and that's not even counting work we know is coming but hasn't yet been sent in a pull request, most notably being the huge AMDGPU DC display code addition and many other DRM additions. But for what has been sent in as pull requests since Sunday night includes:

- AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), Intel User Mode Instruction Prevention (UMIP), and more AVX-512 enablement are among the x86 additions for 4.15.

- AMD Zen temperature monitoring is another addition Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC users have been waiting to see and one of the last notable missing features of AMD Zen processors on Linux.

- The Andrew File-System, AFS, has received a much-needed overhaul.

- Compression improvements for Btrfs.

- "Great scads of new stuff" for the XFS file-system changes.

- EXT4 now supports bigalloc online resizing.

- SMP support for OpenRISC and the possibility of the RISC-V architecture code also being added.

- The USB Type C Port Management (TCPM) has graduated out of staging.

- Various power management updates.

Stay tuned to Phoronix though as there is a lot of other interesting feature changes expected over the next nearly two weeks for this 4.15 merge window; our fingers remain crossed that Torvalds will be accepting the ~130k+ lines of code AMDGPU DC addition for this cycle.