The Changes So Far Of The Linux 4.13 Kernel

For those behind on their Phoronix reading or that of the Linux kernel mailing list, here's a look at all of the prominent changes and new features merged so far during the Linux 4.13 cycle.

We're just past one week of two for the Linux 4.13 merge window. Prominent activity so far includes:

- The big DRM pull with Intel Cannonlake support, initial AMDGPU Raven Ridge support, DRM sync object support, HDMI 3D / stereoscopic for Nouveau, and more.

- A new subsystem for DMA mapping.

- Another new subsystem with Linux 4.13 is the MUX subsystem.

- There's also now a UUID subsystem to unify more UUID/GUID-related code.

- Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) has evolved into its own formal bus on Linux.

- F2FS now supports statx for enhanced file information and Btrfs also picked up statx support.

- EXT4 can now support "large directories" of up to approximately two billion entries in a directory, a much higher limit than previously.

- SEEK_HOLE and SEEK_DATA for XFS.

- New HID hardware support and input drivers.

- A lot of PCI updates.

- POWER architecture updates.

- The Device Mapper code now supports SMR/zoned devices.

- Possible performance improvements for Xen Linux guests.

- Many networking updates.

New ARM support ranging from the Rockchip 1108 SoC to the LeMaker Guitar Board and BeagleBone Blue to the Zidoo X9S and Bubblegum 96.

- New audio hardware support, including some lower-end Realtek codecs.

- Various KVM updates.

- The mainline AppArmor code has a bunch of changes done by Canonical.

- Power management updates for ACPI and P-State, among other areas.

- Write hints for better NVMe performance.

- Hwmon updates.

- Scheduling improvements.

- The usual amount of staging area changes.

Stay tuned for more Linux 4.13 feature coverage through the rest of the merge window followed by the start of our Linux 4.13 kernel benchmarking.