The Many Exciting Features To The Linux 4.8 Kernel
File-Systems / Storage:
- The Btrfs ENOSPC rework is perhaps the most important file-system change this cycle. This rework in the Btrfs file-system should yield better throughput and lower latencies.
- Another big file-system change this cycle was XFS reverse-mapping support to lay the foundation of adding other new features to this FS like data deduplication, copy-on-write, online scrubbing, etc.
- Btrfs also had a second pull request of more clean-ups and bug fixes.
- Kernel-side caching for OrangeFS.
- Unified EXT4 encryption code.
- NVMe over Fabrics and other support work around NVM Express storage.
- Improved support for Shingled Magnetic Recording hard drives.
- The usual changes taking place for XFS and F2FS.
- Improved performance for the NFS client.
Security:
- Hardened usercopy protection for safeguarding objects being copied to/from user-space.
- ASLR for kernel memory sections, a.k.a. CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_MEMORY.
- Many /dev/random improvements including using a ChaCha20-based CRNG for /dev/urandom for greater performance/efficiency/scalability, improved entropy collection for Azure VMs, and more.
- Intel MPX enhancements and other memory management work in the road towards virtually mapped kernel stacks.
Other:
- Express Data Path support in the networking code.
Stay tuned for Linux 4.8 kernel benchmarks on Phoronix beginning in the days ahead. Daily benchmarks of Linux kernel Git code continue to happen on Ubuntu and Fedora systems via our benchmarking software at LinuxBenchmarking.com. Like all of this prompt and concise Linux kernel coverage? Please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium.
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