The New & Best Features Of The Linux 3.11 Kernel

Nearing the end of the Linux 3.11 kernel with most (if not all) of the interesting pull requests merged, here's a look at the exciting features that will premiere in this next Linux kernel release.

Highlights of the Linux 3.11 kernel from our enthusiast perspective include:

Graphics:

- The DRM driver changes dominate the Linux 3.11 kernel! The big feature is Radeon dynamic power management support has finally come to AMD's open-source driver along with early support for the Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" GPUs.

- There's a new DRM display driver.

- Intel Haswell improvements and Valley View / Bay Trail support is now ready for Linux desktop usage.

- H.264 / MPEG-2 video decoding for Nouveau with select NVIDIA GPUs bearing the VP2 engine as part of the PureVideo HD support. This is exposed in Gallium3D via the VDPAU state tracker. There's also early GK110 GPU support.

Disk / File-System:

- LZ4 compression support.

- Zswap was merged for compressed swap caching.

- Various XFS file-system improvements.

- Performance tuning for Btrfs.

- F2FS file-system updates.

- EXT4 file-system updates.

- The Lustre file-system client was merged for the first time.

CPU:

- AVX2 Crypto optimizations.

- PowerPC improvements from IBM.

- Continued ARM improvements.

- Xen and KVM virtualization now work for 64-bit ARM.

General Hardware, Other:

- Input device improvements.

- Lots of audio / sound improvements.

- With Linux 3.11, Wine can now handle Windows RT applications.