Here's What We Know So Far About The Linux 4.3 Kernel

With Linux 4.2 being released yesterday, Linus Torvalds will start honoring pull requests today for the Linux 4.3 merge window. Here's a look at some of the work expected to be merged over the next two weeks.

What we know so far and have been monitoring for 4.3 includes:

- A big rework of the Nouveau driver for open-source NVIDIA graphics.

- Intel Skylake graphics are enabled out-of-the-box / no longer hidden behind the preliminary support flag. That will come alongside other Intel graphics improvements/fixes.

- Open-source R9 Fury "Fiji" support on the new AMDGPU kernel driver that was introduced in Linux 4.2. See that article from yesterday for the caveats and initial performance expectations for the Radeon R9 Fury with the open-source driver.

- An initial AMDGPU scheduler was added but it's disabled by default.

- New hardware support for the Matrox DRM/KMS driver.

- Freedreno HDCP support if needing to playback protected content.

- VMWgfx support for OpenGL 3.

- The Samsung Exynos DRM driver will expose atomic mode-setting and render-node support.

- The EXT3 driver is to be removed.

- The MOST driver subsystem should be introduced.

- Open Channel SSD support.

- There might finally be KDBUS if Greg KH goes ahead with sending in the pull request as planned.

Stay tuned to Phoronix over the next two weeks (and every week) to hear about other developments queued up for landing into the next kernel version.

As always, there are daily Linux kernel Git benchmarks done at LinuxBenchmarking.com to complement the separate tests run here at Phoronix. If you appreciate all of my Linux kernel monitoring, particularly when it comes to graphics and hardware drivers, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium to encourage more thorough writings in the future.