The Big Changes So Far For The Linux 4.15 Kernel - Half Million New Lines Of Code So Far

We are now through week one of two for the merge window of the Linux 4.15 kernel.

If you are behind on your Phoronix reading with the many feature recaps provided this week of the different pull requests, here's a quick recap of the changes so far to be found with Linux 4.15:

- First and foremost for AMD Linux users, AMDGPU DC was finally merged!

- AMDGPU priority scheduling support for the benefit of Steam VR on Linux.

- A ton of other DRM driver updates for AMDGPU/Radeon, Intel i915, Nouveau, and the many smaller drivers.

- RISC-V landed in Linux 4.15 and there's also OpenRISC SMP support.

- Intel laptop battery improvements thanks to SATA link power management changes for Haswell and newer laptops.

- ASPM fixes - Active State Power Management - as well as the usual assortment of ACPI and power management updates.

- Support for networking over Thunderbolt cables.

- F2FS file-system enhancements.

- AFS was overhauled, the long-standing Andrew File System.

- Btrfs compression improvements.

- A lot of new stuff in XFS.

- Bigalloc online resizing for EXT4.

- NVMe improvements and a new maintainer for BCache.

- Continued fixes for the Year 2038 problem.

- AMD Stoney Ridge audio support.

- A few KVM and Xen changes.

- Intel UMIP support along with more AVX-512 goodness.

- New ARM platform support including the Allwinner R40 and Hurricane 2 and many ARM SBCs.

- Correct CPU frequency reporting via /proc/cpuinfo.

- Coffee Lake and Cannonlake thermal support.

- Support for Turbo Boost Max 3.0 with Skylake CPUs.

- AMD Zen temperature monitoring support for Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC processors.

- Secure Encrypted Virtualization is now supported by mainline.

- Improved NUMA node balancing for AMD EPYC processors.

- Greater HDMI CEC support across different drivers, etc.

- New touchpad and touchscreen device support.

- USB Type C Port Management is no longer in staging.

It's been a very busy cycle so far and there is still one week left to the merge window. As of this morning in Linux Git since v4.14, there are 11465 files changed, 571445 insertions(+), 266043 deletions(-). Of those 571k lines of new code, over 130k lines of that is just the AMDGPU DC addition.

Stay tuned for more Linux 4.15 coverage and benchmarks on Phoronix.