Some Of The Best Additions In Linux 4.16

The Linux 4.16 kernel is hopefully being released this Sunday, marking the end to another busy kernel development cycle. We have already written dozens of articles about changes to be found with Linux 4.16 and benchmarks, while here is a quick recap of what makes Linux 4.16 special.

What interests us the most about Linux 4.16 includes:

- The VirtualBox Guest driver was merged, albeit other VirtualBox kernel drivers are still working their way to the mainline kernel too. At least we're finally getting there to allow a better out-of-the-box experience of Linux on Oracle VirtualBox VM by having the necessary guest drivers mainline.

- More ARM boards are supported by the mainline kernel including the Orange Pi R1, Hummingboard2, and even a D-Link DNS_313 NAS enclosure. There's also now NVIDIA Jetson TX2 display support and Tegra TX2 improvements for mainline.

- Continued Linux file-system/storage improvements including lots of changes to XFS, potential performance increases in a few areas of the Linux kernel code, more Btrfs RAID 5/6 fixes, NVMe updates, etc.

- AMDGPU DC now supports multi-display synchronization to allow for a better multi-monitor experience when using this new display code stack that is being enabled by default for all supported GPUs come Linux 4.17.

- Various security improvements and ongoing Spectre and Meltdown mitigation work for all supported architectures.

For a more extensive look at the many changes to Linux 4.16, see our complete Linux 4.16 feature overview.