The Most Interesting Features Of The Linux 4.14 Kernel

If Linux 4.14 weren't an LTS release with so many changes, it would likely be released today with -rc7 having come last week, but due to the size of this new kernel, 4.14-rc8 will most likely be christened today followed by Linux 4.14 next weekend. Here's a reminder about some of the most technically interesting work in this new kernel update.

In the past week there has been nearly 150 commits merged since 4.14-rc7, so Linus will likely go ahead with an -rc8 today, but we won't know for sure until later today. Anyhow, some of the most interesting work you'll be able to find in this kernel series that is also a Long-Term Support release includes:

- Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) was finally merged to mainline.

- AMD Secure Memory Encryption has landed for EPYC server CPUs to yield more secure virtualization and more. I'll be working on some AMD EPYC SME benchmarks soon.

- Zstd compression support was added to the kernel and is wired in with the native transparent file-system compression options offered by Btrfs.

- More Vega improvements in AMDGPU DRM, although the most exciting work on that front will be with Linux 4.15 when "AMDGPU DC" display code should finally be merged.

- Intel has continued on the hardware enablement for next-gen Cannonlake processors.

- The Rapsberry Pi has HDMI CEC support now out of the mainline kernel for "Consumer Electronics Control" for being able to control HDMI-connected devices off a single controller / over the HDMI link.

- Raspberry Pi Zero W, Banana Pi, and various other ARM boards should now play nicely with the mainline kernel.

- The new Realtek "rtlwifi" driver is in staging for the Realtek RTL8822BE 802.11ac hardware.

- A fix to ensure the core performance boost bit gets set for Ryzen processors.

- The ORC unwinder was merged which can now allow for frame pointers to be disabled while still yielding a debugging-friendly kernel. Distributions like Ubuntu that can now disable CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER from their kernel may see slightly better performance as a result.

See our Linux 4.14 feature overview for a more exhaustive list of changes. This kernel is up to around 23.2 million lines.