Linux 3.17 Released

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.17 on Sunday:

So the past week was fairly calm, and so I have no qualms about releasing 3.17 on the normal schedule (as opposed to the optimistic “maybe I can release it one week early” schedule that was not to be).

However, I now have travel coming up – something I hoped to avoid when I was hoping for releasing early. Which means that while 3.17 is out, I’m not going to be merging stuff very actively next week, and the week after that is LinuxCon EU…

What that means is that depending on how you want to see it, the 3.18 merge window will either be three weeks, or alternatively just have a rather slow start. I don’t mind getting pull requests starting now (in fact, I have a couple already pending in my inbox), but I likely won’t start processing them for a week.

Anyway, back to 3.17. Nothing major happened during the last week, as you can see from the appended shortlog. Mostly drivers (i915, nouveau, ethernet, scsi, sound) and some networking fixes. With some misc noise all over.

Go out and test,

Linus

Kernel 3.16 added Nouveau drivers for GK20A GPU (Tegra K1), ARM64/EFI boot, improved support for Xen, KVM, EFI, NFS, as well as various changed to networking, and more…  Some noticeable changes for Linux 3.17:

• Gamepads – Added Microsoft Xbox One controller support, improvements to Sony SIXAXIS support
• Toshiba “Active Protection Sensor” support which stops your harddrive from spinning when the accelerator detects your laptop is in free fall…
• “Cross-thread filter setting” for secure computing facility:
  
  int seccomp(unsigned int operation, unsigned int flag, const char *args);

  1	int seccomp(unsigned int operation, unsigned int flag, const char *args);

  
  See manpage for details.
• Enhanced AMD Radeon R9 290 support
• Miscellaneous Nouveau driver improvements, including Kepler GPU fixes

New features and improvements specific to the ARM architecture include:

• AllWinner
  • A10/A20 – IR driver
  • A31 – PIO/R_PIO external interrupts, DMAengine, GMAC
  • A23: Timers, UARTs, initial bringup, Basic clocks,  PIO/R_PIO drivers
  • New boards: ba10-tvbox; Merrii A31 Hummingbird; pcDuino V3

• Rockchip
  • Enabled RK3288 SoC support
  • Added RK3xxx I2S controller, RK3288 clock controller, RK3066 and RK3188 clock driver.
  • Added RK3288 evaluation boards
• Added basic support for Mediatek MT6589 SoCs
• NEON implementation of crypto algorithms (SHA1; SHA512).
• Marvell Kirkwood now fully “device tree-ified”, mach-kirkwood directory deleted
• Added APM X-Gene SoC ethernet driver support.
• Various changes for Broadcom BCM7xxx STB SoCs, Fresscale i.MX, Samsung Exynos & S5PV210, Nvidia Tegra, Renesas SH and TI AM43xx SoCs.
• ARM64 / ARMv8 – Added 48-bit adress space, CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR (GCC’s -fstack-protector), audit support, and context tracking

I’ve also been asked about MIPS changes last time, so here it is:

• Add Loongson-3B support
• Add NUMA support for Loongson-3
• BCM47XX: Detect more then 128 MiB of RAM (HIGHMEM)
• BCM47XX: add Microsoft MN-700 and Asus WL500G
• Support CPU topology files in sysfs
• kernel: cpu-probe: Add support for the HardWare Table Walker
• perf: Add hardware events for P5600

Further details on Linux 3.17 changes will soon be available on Kernelnewbies.org. For more details about ARM changes, remember to also check ARM architecture and drivers sections.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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