Linux 4.19 Certainly Is Going To Be A Big Kernel

At the end of July I outlined some of the changes queued for Linux 4.19 while since then several more notable additions have become aligned for this next kernel cycle following the one week delay of Linux 4.18.

Linux 4.18 should be out this weekend, which itself is bringing many changes, and in turn will mark the opening of the two week long merge window for 4.19.

In addition to the previously outlined 4.19 changes some of the other new material for those behind on their Phoronix reading this month includes:

- The EROFS file-system is being added to the staging area as the newest (albeit read-only) Linux file-system.

- Enhanced IBRS support is queued as supporting this better -- and less performance overhead -- Spectre mitigation technique to be supported by future Intel processors.

- DPU1 support in the Freedreno MSM DRM driver that is needed for display support on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC and newer.

- Thunderbolt run-time power management support is queued.

- Lazy TLB improvements.

- Raven Ridge support in AMDKFD for OpenCL/ROCm support for these new APUs.

- Atomic mode-setting for the Armada DRM driver code.

- Zstd compression support for the "pstore" persistent store functionality.

- More laptop quirks are handled.

- Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D support for this now-old sound card.

- Correct AMD Threadripper 2900 series temperature monitoring support albeit this change will also be back-ported to currently supported stable series.

- Intel IWLWIFI adding 802.11ax support for the new WiFi standard.

- A STACKLEAK feature ported from old GrSecurity/PaX code.

Plus a lot more. Stay tuned for our Linux 4.19 merge window coverage over the next two weeks followed by our subsequent Linux kernel benchmarks.