Linus Torvalds introduced the release of the Linux kernel 4.7

Linus Torvalds introduced the Linux kernel 4.7 . Two weeks have passed since the release of rc7, and the final patch is not so great. Its size is 34 MB (9744 files are changed, 493490 lines of code are added, and 194974 lines are deleted). 50% of the changes are related to device drivers, 19% - updating the support code for hardware architectures, 15% - with the network stack, 5% of the changes affected file systems, and another 4% - internal kernel subsystems.

Core 4.7 supports open-source AMD Polaris (RX 480), new ARM platforms and motherboards, the Xbox One Elite Controller, includes several improvements to the Intel Kabylake graphics . In the core - 12 thousand patches from 1500+ developers. There is also a version of the free kernel 4.7 - Linux-libre 4.7-gnu .

Iron

• Added support for 500+ new hardware elements. In addition to the Microsoft Xbox One Elite Controller, drivers for the Intel 9260 wireless modules, Chelsio iSCSI Target Offload Controller have been added. There are new codecs Realteks ALC234, ALC274, ALC294, ALC700, ALC701 and ALC703;
  The most notable is the addition of support for the Radeon RX480 GPU with the architecture of a new type of Polaris;
  Now the kernel already supports 26,300 different drivers.

Network

• Reduced the delay in the work of a large number of packets due to the optimization of the TCP stack;
  Added the ability to create virtual controllers for USB devices into the USB / IP stack. This stack provides access to remote USB-devices via TCP / IP. Virtual devices can be created in the system;
  Resistance TCP stack to syn-flood increased. Performance under flooding conditions has been almost doubled - from 3.2 to 6 million packets per second.

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File systems and work with drives

• In the information caching system, the possibility of simultaneously conducting several checks in one directory has appeared;
  NFS now supports COPY;
  The sync_file, originally created for Android, has now been moved to the main core;
  In EXT4, it is now possible to interrupt the readdir () operation for empty directories where many files were previously located.

System

• There is a new processor frequency control mechanism in cpufreq. The new schedutil engine uses information from the task scheduler and can work directly with cpufreq drivers to change the processor frequency, optimizing it in accordance with the current load;
  Added the hist command to ftrace. This command provides the means to generate histograms of events. Information about upcoming events is collected in the form of a key value;
  A new hashing library (linux / stringhash.h) has appeared, it is devoid of problems typical of previously available string hashing code.

Security and Virtualization

• A new LoadPin module has appeared, which verifies that the kernel loads files from one file system. This module was previously created for Chrome OS;
• SeLinux now has the ability to limit the loading of kernel modules.

More complete update information available here and here .