4.14 LTS “Fearless Coyote” is here
Linux kernel 4.14, codenamed “Fearless Coyote,” has been released by Linus Torvalds. “The appended shortlog is obviously only for the (small) haul since rc8, and it really is tiny. Not very many commits, and they are small,” Torvalds wrote his Linux Kernel Mailing List announcement.
He also took time to mention how 0day robot has been getting better. The “robot” being talked about here is an automated vulnerability, and flaw detected that scans kernel code.
Major feature highlights
The major highlight feature of Linux kernel 4.14 LTS release is the merging of Heterogeneous Memory Management into mainline. It was being developed to allow a process address space to be mirrored and making sure that the system memory is used transparently by any device.
Another big change comes in the form of support for larger memory limits on x86_64 hardware. Here’s a brief list of new features that might interest you:
- Vega improvements
- Hardware enablement on Cannonlake continued
- Zstd compressed added
- AMD Secure Memory Encryption dor EPYC server CPUs
- New Realtek “rtlwifi” driver
- R-Pi gets HDMI CEC support
- F2FS tuning for Android
- Btrfs, EXT4, XFS improvements
- Intel Cache Quality Monitoring code rewritten
You can find a more exhaustive list of Linux kernel 4.14 features here on Phoronix.
This release also means that the merge window for Linux kernel 4.15 is now open. Describing 4.14 release as “painful,” Torvalds urged the developers to start getting the work done sooner.
The 4.14 source tarball can be grabbed from kernel.org.
