Linux 4.19 Had A Very Exciting First Week Of New Features

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 19 August 2018 at 06:00 PM EDT. 6 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
The Linux 4.19 kernel merge window opened one week ago and there's been a lot of new features and improvements to be merged during this front-half of the merge period. If you are behind on your Phoronix reading, here's a look at the highlights for week one.

Some of the main pull requests with new features to come in during this first week of the Linux 4.19 merge window included:

- An in-kernel GPS subsystem seems like it's a decade or so past due.

- The read-only EROFS file-system and Gasket Driver Framework are new to the staging area.

- USB Type-C Display Mode alternate driver is added as well as the Type-C port manager being promoted out of staging.

- The lazy TLB mode has been made lazier for small performance benefits.

- An option to enable if wanting to trust your CPU's hardware random number generator but by default it will be considered untrusted still.

- The STACKLEAK plug-in is now mainline for preventing some stack attacks.

- The VKMS DRM driver is added for virtual KMS on headless systems.

- Qualcomm Adreno 600 series support for MSM DRM.

- The other big DRM subsystem/driver updates.

- Various crypto updates but not the removal of Speck.

- The RISC-V support is beginning to work with user-space bits and running the SiFive Unleashed and under QEMU with Fedora.

- Many x86 KVM additions.

- More Spectre mitigation for POWER.

- Other Spectre work in the x86 space.

- A bunch of good stuff for 64-bit ARM.

- IBM s390 has also seen more Spectre work.

- Support for 802.11ax wireless and other networking additions.

- An idle injection framework and other power management enhancements.

- Creative Recon3D sound card support and other new sound hardware support.

- Faster SMB3/CIFS performance.

- Routine file-system work and low-level improvements for Btrfs.

- The long in development XArray data structure.

- Threadripper 2 temperature monitoring.

- Other smaller features.

Stay tuned for week two of the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window followed by our benchmarks.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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