A Look At The Plethora Of Linux 4.16 Kernel Features & Changes

Other Hardware:

- New ARM device support including the Orange Pi R1, Actions S700 SoC support, Hummingboard2 support, D-Link DNS-313 NAS enclosure support, and various other boards.

- The Tegra TX2 from NVIDIA now has mainline HDMI and I2C support along with other subsystem work.

- A new Qualcomm QMI driver for the modem on Snapdragon SoCs.

- New Wacom device support for second-generation "One by Wacom" tablets. Also new ASUS HID driver additions.

- New sound drivers with the most notable addition being the Allwinner A83T driver.

- Several PCI subsystem updates including AtomicOps support needed by AMD as a requirement for getting their dGPU improvements next cycle for AMDKFD, latency tolerance reporting for ASPM L1 sub-states, faster unplug/shutdown of Thunderbolt controllers, and fixed support for hot removal of GPUs.

- The usual assortment of x86 laptop platform driver updates affecting Dell, Lenovo, ASUS and other brands.

- IOMMU improvements affecting both AMD and Intel.

- Media subsystem updates include a work-in-progress NVIDIA Tegra Decoder and an Xbox One TV tuner for the USB device.

General:

- Three new subsystems for Siox, Slimbus, and SoundWire. Slimbus and Soundwire are MIPI standards while Siox is a bus system for Eckelmann AG's building management and refrigeration systems in industrial/commercial applications.

- Various networking improvements.

- VirtualBox Guest driver was mainlined while other VirtualBox guest kernel drivers are still en route to being mainlined.

- More code graduating from staging.

- Flex and Bison are new build requirements for compiling the Linux kernel due to Kconfig changes. There is also now mainline support for building a Linux kernel snap using the "make snap-pkg" command.

- Support for GCC 8 within the kernel's gcc-plugins infrastructure.

Now onward to begin the Linux 4.16 Git benchmarking...