KDBUS & Other Features You Won't FInd In The Linux 4.0 Kernel

While Linux 4.0 is the next major kernel release and it does present a new lot of new functionality, there's still a number of high profile features not mainlined.

Likely the biggest feature not seen in Linux 4.0 that many have been looking forward to is KDBUS. This D-Bus based code for the Linux kernel to do inter-process communication has been baking for a long time and was hoped for merging in 2014. While three versions of KDBUS have went out for review, this big ticket item wasn't merged in the Linux 4.0 merge window... Maybe Linux 4.1?

Another item being sought after by many Phoronix readers is the new "AMDGPU" kernel driver that succeeds the Radeon DRM and will also be used by the future Catalyst Linux driver under their new driver model. The work was announced back in October and we were told code should start coming out this winter, but we have yet to see the AMDGPU patches published and thus weren't a possibility for Linux 4.0. The AMDGPU DRM driver is needed for supporting the Radeon R9 285 Tonga and future AMD GPUs. Given Carrizo APUs aren't too far out, hopefully the new AMD GPU driver patches will be published in the next few weeks so they can go through the open technical review process and be ready for merging into Linux 4.1.

Another DRM driver that was written off as dead but might end up coming back around is the VIA DRM driver. James Simmons has resurrected work on the open-source VIA graphics driver and even started work on the VIA Gallium3D driver. He's had working code for quite some time, but hasn't yet called for it being merged to the mainline kernel.

Reiser4 also isn't found in Linux 4.0, for anyone holding out hope about this file-system and haven't yet turned to ZFS On Linux or Btrfs for advanced Linux file-system capabilities. Reiser4 remains actively maintained as an out-of-tree kernel module. Reiser4 likely won't ever be mainlined unless it picks up some vendor backing.

Another file-system not yet seeing the light of day within the mainline Linux kernel is Tux3, a versioning file-system that its main developer has been working to stabilize over the past year to get it into shape for merging.

Is there anything else you'd like to see in the Linux kernel that hasn't yet made it? Be sure to share with us in our forums.