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Linux 4.10: New Open Source Features

By on March 2, 2017
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Linux Kernel 4.10 introduces new features for the open source community.

The one sentence overview would be lots of open-source graphics driver work (as always), the open-source NVIDIA driver is killing it with this release, Intel TBM3 support, UBIFS file-encryption, more AMD Zen/Ryzen code, more ARM SoCs/platforms being mainlined, DAX iomap support, and a fair amount of other new hardware support.

The open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) DRM driver this time around is quite exciting after missing out on their changes for Linux 4.9.

Work here includes:

  • atomic mode-setting that allows setting output modes more cleanly by either being able to succeed or fail in one-go while also being able to test a desired mode in advance of the operation, reducing possible flickering situations while also being quicker.
  • DisplayPort MST support has been pulled into DRM-Next tree of material.
  • Performance-improving BOOST support, boost patch available in Linux 4.9 yet.
  • LED driver for the light-up cards, a basic LED driver that hooks up to the LED subsystem and in turn allowing to sync the blinking to the CPU/disk/network activity or other manual controls.

The Linux 4.10 features so far continue to be expanded with the Broadcom VC4 DRM driver most notably used by Raspberry Pi hardware picking up some new functionality.

The VC4 DRM driver for providing open-source Raspberry Pi 3D capabilities with Linux 4.10 has added the kernel-side support for ETC1 texture compression while the VC4 Gallium3D driver has already been updated with this support when on a supported kernel.

Additionally, the latest VC4 DRM driver pull request has landed the kernel-side components for supporting fragment shader threading.

Finally you can find Linux Kernel 4.10 other features here.

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