The Staging Pull For Linux 3.20 Has A Lot Of Changes All Over The Place

The latest pull requests sent in for the Linux 3.20 kernel are the various subsystems maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman. The changes for the USB drivers, char/misc, driver core, staging, and TTY/serial aren't too jaw-dropping, but for staging at least is the usual heavy churn between kernel cycles.

The staging driver patches for Linux 3.20/4.0 are plentiful as usual. What Greg KH had to say about it, "Here's the big staging driver tree update for 3.20-rc1. Lots of little things in here, adding up to lots of overall cleanups. The IIO driver updates are also in here as they cross the staging tree boundry a lot. I2O has moved into staging as well, as a plan to drop it from the tree eventually as that's a dead subsystem."

So I2O was demoted to staging as being a defunct I/O specification from Intel during the 90's, those unfamiliar with it or wishing to reminisce can find this Wikipedia page. The staging pull for Linux 3.20 also has many changes to the Lustre code, Unisys driver code clean-ups, many Comedi code clean-ups, rtl8723au driver updates, and hundreds of other changes.

Of interest to some users might be the landing of the fbtft module. The kernel fbtft module provides support for small TFT LCD display modules. The FBTFT module makes it easy to write Linux frame-buffer drivers for small TFT LCD display modules. Those wishing to learn more about the FBTFT support that's now in staging can see the project Wiki page.