PCI, Crypto & Other Updates Head Into Linux 4.17

We are at the end of the first (and busiest) week of the two-week long Linux 4.17 kernel merge window. There have been many articles on Phoronix about the big highlights of this next kernel version while here are some of the smaller change-sets that came about this week.

Aside from the many articles about the prominent additions to Linux 4.17, there were also many smaller but still significant pull requests. Some of these other pulls this week for the 4.17 kernel included:

- PCI changes with still some ASPM (Active State Power Management) fixes, decoding for 16 GT/s link speed, support for computing the maximum supported link bandwidth and bandwidth available to a device, other bug/issue reporting improvements, Tegra PCI power management support, Tegra loadable module support, and other updates and fixes.

- VFIO updates include ioeventfd support.

- ARM64 features a rework of the CPU features framework so that CPUs can be whitelisted that don't require KPTI, including in heterogeneous ARM systems. There is also support for AArch64 IDC/DIC extensions, memory model changes, a workaround for Cortex-A55 hardware erratum, and other fixes/improvements.

- Crypto updates include SPECK and SM4 block ciphers being added, improved scheduling latency on ARM, scatter/gather support for GCM in the AES-NI driver, AEAD support to the crypto engine, batch registration in SIMD, and other crypto driver improvements.

- Improvements to the leaking_addresses script.

We'll see what more comes to the Linux 4.17 kernel over the week ahead followed by our usual feature summary and onwards to the benchmarking process. Linux 4.17.0 will likely be released as stable around mid-June.