Linux kernel 4.3 is out now!
And ships a boat-load of new features.
Updates to the Linux kernel have been coming thick and fast recently, with Linus Torvalds announcing the release of 4.3 at the beginning of November. However, unlike some of the more recent kernel released, version 4.3 comes with a decent amount of exciting new features.
With 4.3 there’s plenty of good news for gamers as there are a number of improvements to how the kernel handles graphics drivers. The headline features include default support for Intel Skylake graphics. This will help make use of the powerful integrated graphics of the latest generation of processors from Intel, as well as new atomic mode-setting code, 12bpc support for HDMI and improved frame-buffer compression.
If you’re looking to buy a brand new AMD graphics card instead, then opensource support has also been included in 4.3, though it’s still early days for features, such as changing clock speeds and power management.
If you’ve got an Nvidia graphics card then the open source Nouveau driver has also been given some love. Ben Skeggs, who maintains the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver, has this to say: “Beyond correcting some not-so-great design decisions and making the code a lot easier to work with, there’s not much exciting (aside from lower memory usage and GPU VM being be a lot faster etc) to be gained by the end-user as a result of the cleanup; it mostly lays the groundwork for future improvements.”
If you use virtual machines for graphically intensive tasks then you’ll be pleased to see that OpenGL 3.3 will be supported on guest virtual machines, instead of OpenGL 2.1.
There have also been various other DRM driver updates and improvements, but 4.3 isn’t all about the graphics: Disk and file systems have also been given boosts. The Ext3 driver has been dropped thanks to the Ext4 driver’s backwards compatibility. This move hasn’t been free from controversy, but it looks like there’s faith in Ext4 handling Ext3 file-systems.
The Ext4 driver itself gets a number of bug fixes and cleanups and XFS also gets in on the update game. You can view the list of fixes at http://bit.ly/ XFSUpdatesFor4_3.
Linux kernel 4.3 is also bringing improvements for processors as well, eg x86 systems will benefit from boottime optimisations which will, hopefully, lead to faster start-up times, thanks to useless code being dumped, and various delays in the boot process having been eliminated. Although individually these delays may not seem like much (each one being around 100- 500 microseconds long), when combined they produce a noticeable delay so their removal is welcome.
Linux 4.3 also brings new ARM v8.1 features, which include PAN (Privileged Access Never), LSE (Large System Extension) and DBM (Dirty Bit Management) support, along with SMP support.
The latest kernel will also support new 64-bit ARM SoCs, such as Broadcom North Star 2, Marvell Berlin4CT, Mediatek MT6795 and the Rockchip RK3368, as well as support for Freescale i.MX6UL and Atmel SAMA5D2. The kernel also bundles Qualcomm drivers for SMM/SMD to communicate with co-processors and new Tegra drivers from Nvidia.
If all of that wasn’t enough there are new Xen virtualisation features in 4.3 as well as improved input driver updates, including drivers for Wacom tablets and improved support for Toshiba laptops running Linux.
Phew. So it’s a pretty comprehensive kernel release then and though at times the process was a little fraught, Linux 4.3 released without any hiccups. As Linus Torvalds notes himself in his mailing list ( https://lkml.org/ lkml/2015/11/1/202): “So on the whole, this remains a rather calm release cycle until the very end. And with the release of 4.3, obviously the merge window for 4.4 is open, and let’s keep our fingers crossed that that will be an equally calm release. Especially since … 4.4 will be another Long Term Support (LTS) release.”
“The headline features include default support for Intel Skylake graphics.”