An Overview Of Linux 3.12 Kernel Features

The merge window for the Linux 3.12 kernel is coming to an end and 3.12-rc1 should be released soon. Here's an overview of the interesting merges that happened over the past two weeks as new features for Linux 3.12.

Last week I already wrote about some of the good features of Linux 3.12 but in the past week there's more to cover.

- Improved Dynamic Power Management support for newer Radeon GPUs and other changes after the Radeon DPM feature was merged in Linux 3.11

- A Snapdragon KMS/DRM driver from the Freedreno project for the Qualcomm Adreno.

- Runtime GPU power management for NVIDIA Optimus laptops to be able to dynamically power on/off secondary GPUs.

- Experimental support for DRM render nodes.

- AMD Berlin APU support for the first HSA server APU.

- Intel Haswell graphics improvements with eLLC DRAM support now enabled for the systems with Iris Pro 5200 graphics bearing dedicated memory for graphics.

- Staging driver updates.

- Sound driver work.

- EXT4 gained new features of aggressive extent caching and better recovery.

- F2FS file-system improvements.

- Lenovo Ideapad Slidebar support.

- XFS file-system improvements.

- Btrfs file-system performance improvements.