Linux 4.15 Is Shaping Up To be An Exciting Kernel, Especially For AMD Users

There still is a few weeks to go until the Linux 4.14 kernel will be released, but following that the Linux 4.15 kernel is shaping up to be a very exciting cycle.

Among the feature work on our radar so far for Linux 4.15 includes:

- AMDGPU DC landing, assuming Linus Torvalds has no objections to this ~120k+ lines of code display stack being merged for 4.15. Right now it's queued up as a separate branch alongside the other DRM changes. AMDGPU DC allows for Radeon RX Vega display support, HDMI/DP audio support, atomic mode-setting, and gets close to delivering FreeSync/AdaptiveSync support. It's long been sought after and certainly what we are most excited to see with 4.15.

- AMDGPU also has other feature work include prepping for the upcoming "Raven Ridge" Zen+Vega APUs, continued PowerPlay cleanups, increased fragment size, GPU reset support for Vega, and more.

- RISC-V might make it to mainline for this next kernel release after going through several rounds of code review.

- The usual plethora of Intel DRM driver updates including more "Gen 10" Cannonlake preparations, Coffeelake graphics no longer being considered "alpha", and transparent huge-pages support.

- AMD Zen temperature monitoring support is another big addition for exciting AMD Linux customers. This has been among the last Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC Linux patches we've been waiting on... With Linux 4.15 will be support in the k10temp driver for reporting the Zen CPU package temperature but there is no per-core monitoring support yet.

- While on the thermal topic is also Nouveau Pascal temperature monitoring support.

Other interesting work also includes:

- Etnaviv performance counter support.

- Likely some shiny new XFS feature work.

- Raspberry Pi 7" touchpanel display support.

So far most of our coverage has been focused on the Direct Rendering Manager happenings, but once the Linux 4.15 merge window rolls around, you can expect to find our usual reporting of all the interesting highlights through the entire Linux kernel realm.