Some Of The Smaller Features Hitting The Linux 4.19 Kernel This Week

Here is a look at some of the smaller features landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel this week in a variety of different subsystems.

While the big ticket features and major changes tend to get their own articles on Phoronix, here is a look at some of the smaller changes that are still worth mentioning for the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel:

- Improved NUMA emulation is part of the x86 CPU updates. This includes as well a numa=fake= kernel config option for dividing physical nodes into emulated nodes.

- The bulk pin control work includes support for the Intel Icelake PCH.

- Media updates include several new sensor (ak7375, ov2680 and rj54n1cb0c), VCM (dw9807-vcm), platform drivers (vicodec), DVB API improvements, and other work to this subsystem.

- Block changes include a number of NVMe updates including improved tracepoints, buffered I/O support, effects log support, larger inline data support with RDMA, and various fixes. There is also now block io-latency controller support, LightNVM updates, BFQ updates, BCache fixes, and improved merging performance for blk-mq.

- More XFS work includes the removal of buffer heads as part of a big code re-work as well as dropping the barrier/nobarrier mount options and various other low-level coding improvements.

- Xen sees work on DMA-BUF functionality to the Xen grant table handling, a fix for booting the kernel as Xen PVH Dom0, and other fixes, including some minor performance work.

- More Year 2038 work is included in the kernel's timers core code. There is also enhanced timekeeping suspend/resume support, among other adjustments.

- Pstore now has support for Zstd compression, as previously talked about.