Features That Landed So Far For The Linux 3.15 Kernel

For those not keeping up to date on all of the Phoronix articles covering the Linux 3.15 kernel changes that landed in the past week, here's a recap of the changes that were merged so far half-way through the Linux 3.15 merge window.

- EFI mixed mode support to allow 64-bit Linux kernels to be booted from 32-bit system UEFI firmwares.

- AVX-512 instruction support for future Intel processors.

- AHCI libata improvements.

- Scheduler improvements.

- The mainline Linux kernel can almost be exploited for better performance through link-time optimization support for the kernel.

- Performance and bug-fixes for the Btrfs file-system.

- Many audio/sound improvements.

- ACPI and power management improvements, particularly better support for new hardware and ACPI improvements.

- Support was dropped for old x86 platforms.

- Kernfs is in better shape for other subsystems wishing to utilize this sysfs-derived code.

- Better Windows guest support for KVM virtualization.

- New input device support for the Linux 3.15 kernel, including Sony's DualShock 4 controller for the PlayStation 4.

- Better write performance with the FUSE file-systems in user-space.

- Intel RDSEED support for better randomness.

- EXT4 and XFS file-system updates.

- New media/V4L2 drivers.

- ARM SoC updates.

There's still several more days left to the Linux 3.15 merge window before Linux 3.15-rc1 is declared, including the DRM pull and other interesting merges, so stay tuned for the latest Linux kernel updates on Phoronix.