The Changes So Far For The Linux 4.11 Kernel

We are now through week one of two for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window. I've already written a number of news posts this past week covering features I find interesting for Linux 4.11. If you are short on time and behind in your Phoronix reading, here's a quick overview of the material so far for this next major kernel bump.

Among the changes for Linux 4.11 so far include:

- As usual, our favorite, is all of the DRM graphics driver changes and there is plenty this cycle (Direct Rendering Manager, for the uninitiated).

- Some new drivers in staging benefiting the Raspberry Pi.

- Power-saving PCI-E L1 PM sub-state support is now available from the mainline kernel on supported hardware.

- Realtek ALC1220 support, which is the audio codec used by many newer Intel Kabylake and AMD Ryzen motherboards.

- The Serial Device Bus "SERDEV" was merged although drivers aren't going to be using it until at least Linux 4.12.

- A variety of KVM improvements for the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine.

- New ARM SoC and board support.

- Better Turbo Boost Max 3.0 support for newer Intel CPUs capable of boosting for better single-threaded performance.

- OpenRISC optimizations and other improvements although it's not exactly easy/possible to find any OpenRISC hardware on the market yet.

- MD RAID optimizations.

- New input drivers.

- New media drivers.

- A lot of networking updates.

- XFS clean-ups and fixes and EXT4 fixes.

- An assortment of block layer updates.

- PVHv2 support for Xen.

- EFI memory attributes table support.

- Continued tweaking to Intel P-State and other power management updates.

- Expanded Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) support.

- Wacom Intuos Pro support and other driver changes for Wacom tablets.

As usual, I will have my more thorough Linux 4.11 feature overview write-up next weekend when the 4.11 merge window closes and the Linux 4.11-rc1 kernel has been tagged.