The Linux 3.14 Kernel Already Has Many Exciting Features

While the Linux 3.14 kernel merge window is barely half way over, there's already a ton of exciting changes to make this yet another very interesting kernel update. Here's some of what end-users can expect to see out of Linux 3.14 in terms of improvements and new functionality.

There will be a more comprehensive listing of the Linux 3.14 features once the merge window is complete and I've had time to go through all of the merges and mailing list messages once more since as usual there's been usually multiple news posts each day on Phoronix about Linux 3.14 changes. Among the most interesting work covered that's either merged or queued up for Linux 3.14 include:

- AMD Cryptographic Coprocessor support. While AMD hasn't been too clear, this driver is likely for the upcoming Opteron processors with embedded ARM support boasting ARM TrustZone technology.

- Along with the AMD CCP, there's new ARM support in Linux 3.14.

- The Nouveau DRM driver now supports the GeForce GTX 780 and TITAN GPUs (a.k.a. the GK110 GPUs) along with some other new hardware support but Nouveau power management / re-clocking sadly isn't yet a reality for the Linux kernel.

- Intel HBR2 support and with the Intel DRM changes is also official/proper Broadwell graphics support.

- Major VMware SVGA2 graphics driver changes.

- NVIDIA Tegra PRIME support.

- Radeon DPM for newer AMD GPUs and other Radeon graphics kernel driver improvements.

- Intel Broadwell audio support and other sound improvements in general for Linux.

- Generic CPU Boost support and Bay Trail P-State support along with other CPUfreq tweaks.

- Intel Merrifield MID support.

- F2FS performance improvements.

- Kernfs has come about as splitting the sysfs logic up so it can be used by other file-systems like debugfs.

- Xen PVH support.

- SCHED_DEADLINE merged into Linux 3.14 for better real-time support.

In the coming days should still be some other yet-to-be-covered merges like Btrfs, etc. Stay tuned and then once the merge window is over is when the Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks will begin on Phoronix.