The Top Features Of The Linux 3.15 Kernel

With the Linux 3.15 kernel expected for release within the next few days, here is a rundown of the top features that are introduced as part of this big kernel release.

Phoronix articles in the past two months have been covering many of the highlights of Linux 3.15, but with the hundreds of articles each month on Phoronix, here is a recap for those not up to speed on this kernel update with changes I find to be the most exciting for end-users:

- Linux 3.15 gains EFI mixed mode support to support running a 64-bit Linux kernel on a system with 32-bit UEFI. Most new systems are now shipping with 64-bit UEFI support, but some laptops/ultrabooks/convertibles from a few months ago have been causing problems with 32-bit-only UEFI while having 64-bit CPUs.

- Faster suspend and resume times should be noted with this new kernel release. The faster S&R comes from enabling asynchronous threads for more of the suspend and resume phases.

- Of interest to many Phoronix readers are the open-source graphics driver improvements that include initial NVIDIA Maxwell GPU support and on the Radeon side is the VCE 2.0 video encoding support for recent AMD graphics cards. There's also various other changes to all of the key Linux DRM graphics drivers.

- On the future CPU front is AVX-512 and RDSEED extension support.

- The Sony DualShock 4 controller is now supported by the Linux 3.15 kernel.

- Newer notebooks should play nicer with the new kernel release.

- LLVM Clang is nearly capable to compile the mainline Linux kernel; there's my Building The Linux Kernel With LLVM's Clang Yields Comparable Performance article as a result.

There's a longer list of Linux 3.15 features within our two earlier articles. Stay tuned for the official Linux 3.15 release in the days ahead while already we have a lot of Linux 3.16 kernel coverage with its merge window having opened a week early.