Linux kernel 4.12 releases with Pascal-3d acceleration support

A new version of the Linux kernel was released on Monday with number 4.12. The release introduces 3D acceleration support for Nvidia’s GTX 1000 GPUs in the open source Nouveau driver. Furthermore, support for Vega GPUs from AMD is part of the kernel.

According to Linus Torvalds, this release is historically one of the bigger ones. Only 4.9 would have had more commits. The size in the current case would be due to the addition of the header files to support AMD’s Vega, which make up half of the release. Current amdgpu driver provides support first, more improvements to come in the future. Support for controlling a monitor will only come in version 4.14 of the kernel, according to Phoronix.

The support for 3d acceleration for Nvidia GPUs of the Pascal generation is also not completely complete. For example, there is no support yet for adjusting the clock speed of a card, so performance will initially be disappointing. Other changes in the new kernel include that Intel’s i915 graphics driver uses atomic modesetting by default, allowing pre-recognition and avoidance of unsupported configurations.

There are also two new i/o schedulers in the form of Kyber and bfq. According to Heise, the latter should mainly lead to performance gains with traditional HDDs and not so much with SSDs. With the addition of these and other innovations, the total number of lines in the kernel comes to 24.2 million.