Some Of The Smaller Features Hitting The Linux 4.19 Kernel This Week

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 16 August 2018 at 05:22 AM EDT. Add A Comment
LINUX KERNEL
Here is a look at some of the smaller features landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel this week in a variety of different subsystems.

While the big ticket features and major changes tend to get their own articles on Phoronix, here is a look at some of the smaller changes that are still worth mentioning for the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel:

- Improved NUMA emulation is part of the x86 CPU updates. This includes as well a numa=fake= kernel config option for dividing physical nodes into emulated nodes.

- The bulk pin control work includes support for the Intel Icelake PCH.

- Media updates include several new sensor (ak7375, ov2680 and rj54n1cb0c), VCM (dw9807-vcm), platform drivers (vicodec), DVB API improvements, and other work to this subsystem.

- Block changes include a number of NVMe updates including improved tracepoints, buffered I/O support, effects log support, larger inline data support with RDMA, and various fixes. There is also now block io-latency controller support, LightNVM updates, BFQ updates, BCache fixes, and improved merging performance for blk-mq.

- More XFS work includes the removal of buffer heads as part of a big code re-work as well as dropping the barrier/nobarrier mount options and various other low-level coding improvements.

- Xen sees work on DMA-BUF functionality to the Xen grant table handling, a fix for booting the kernel as Xen PVH Dom0, and other fixes, including some minor performance work.

- More Year 2038 work is included in the kernel's timers core code. There is also enhanced timekeeping suspend/resume support, among other adjustments.

- Pstore now has support for Zstd compression, as previously talked about.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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