Linux 4.14 comes out as next lts kernel

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.14. This kernel forms the basis of the next lts version. The new version includes heterogeneous memory management and improvements for GPU drivers.

Jérôme Glisse, the developer responsible for heterogeneous memory management, or HMM, explains that this gives the GPU access to the address space of processes. Other changes in the new version include increased memory limits, pushing the maximum virtual memory to 128PiB on x86-64 systems.

Furthermore, the Raspberry Pi, for example, gets hdmi cec support, which allows control via HDMI. On the AMD front, there is support for secure memory encryption for Epyc CPUs in addition to some improvements in the amdgpu driver. Amdgpu DC is in version 4.15 of the kernel according to Phoronix. Finally, zstd support has been added in btrfs and squashfs.

Torvalds writes at the release that there are no big surprises, but that the automated tool for finding zero days is getting better and better. He points to a last-minute tweak that removed code that was supposed to display the MHz value in /proc/cpuinfo. The code worked, but caused problems on systems with hundreds of CPU cores.