Six Interesting Features Of The Linux 4.6 Kernel

If all goes well before the day is through will be the release of the Linux 4.6 kernel. If you've been behind on your Phoronix readings the past few weeks, here are the highlights to look forward to with Linux 4.6.

Six features of Linux 4.6 that excite me include:

- Mainline support for a number of new ARM SoCs and platforms/boards!

- Various Radeon and AMDGPU improvements to make the open-source AMD graphics driver stack more stable and robust.

- Initial NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" open-source support! While Pascal is days away from shipping, with Linux 4.6 there is finally 3D/acceleration support for Maxwell when grabbing NVIDIA's signed firmware blobs they've made available. Before getting too excited, the support isn't as mature as Kepler and they don't yet have any re-clocking support for being able to provide good performance.

- Runtime AHCI power management for greater power savings.

- Dell and Alienware laptop support improvements, including for the popular Dell XPS 13 Skylake laptop.

- Better security for 32-bit Linux programs.

These were just six interesting new features of Linux 4.6. To read about the dozens of other changes, see my complete Linux 4.6 feature overview.