Features Added So Far To The Linux 3.19 Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 15 December 2014 at 01:14 PM EST. Add A Comment
LINUX KERNEL
We're now half-way through the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window so here's a recap of the most interesting features that have been merged thus far for what will become the first major Linux kernel release of 2015.

Among the changes found to be most interesting so far for Linux 3.19 include:

- Many DRM graphics driver updates! There's a lot of good stuff from AMD HSA's AMDKFD driver to Intel Skylake support to tons of improvements to all of the prominent drivers. There's also the new Rockchip DRM driver and improvements for the iMX and MSM ARM drivers too. Read that article as there's way too many DRM changes to list here in this summary.

- The read-only SquashFS file-system commonly used by live Linux distributions has LZ4 compression support.

- RAID 5/6 improvements for Btrfs along with other enhancements to this next-generation Linux file-system.

- Various XFS improvements.

- Faster boot times and improvements for the F2FS flash file-system.

- Bug-fixes for EXT4.

- Multi-queue block layer enhancements including the NVMe driver supporting this faster interface.

- DM performance optimizations.

- Multi-layer support for OverlayFS.

- Lots of MIPS architecture updates.

- ARM's CoreSight framework was finally merged for improving ARM tracing and debugging.

- VirtIO and Xen updates.

- Better multi-touch support for more Logitech input hardware.

- A lot of sound driver updates.

- MPX extension support on the kernel-side, a CPU instruction set extension found with Intel Skylake CPUs.

- Numerous ACPI+PM improvements for bettering Linux power management.

Stay tuned to Phoronix for coverage of the rest of the Linux 3.19 merge window pull requests this week. Expect the Linux 3.19-rc1 kernel to be released around next weekend.
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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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