Linux Kernel 4.10 Comes with New Security Features

Linus Torvalds has released Linux kernel 4.10, code-named Anniversary Edition, which brings many new features, including support for new hardware. One of the most significant improvements is support for virtual GPU. “This release adds support for Intel GVT-g for KVM (a.k.a. KVMGT), a full GPU virtualization solution with mediated pass-through, starting from 4th generation Intel Core (Haswell) processors with Intel Graphics,” according to Kernelnewbies, “The capability of running native graphics driver inside a VM, without hypervisor intervention in performance critical paths, achieves a good balance among performance, feature, and sharing capability.”

The Linux kernel supports many filesystems, and with this release, it has improved support for some of these filesystems, including ext4, F2FS, XFS, OverlayFS, NFS, CIFS, UBIFS, BeFS, and LogFS.

The release has also improved support for ARM-powered devices, including Huawei Nexus 6P (Angler), LG Nexus 5X (Bullhead), Nexbox A1 and A95X Android TV boxes, the Pine64 development board based on Allwinner A64, the Globalscale Marvell ESPRESSOBin community board based on Armada 3700, and the Renesas “R-Car Starter Kit Pro” (M3ULCB) low-cost automotive board.

Announcing the release, Torvalds wrote on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): “On the whole, 4.10 didn’t end up as small as it initially looked. After the huge release that was 4.9, I expected things to be pretty quiet, but it ended up very much a fairly average release by modern kernel standards. So we have about 13,000 commits (not counting merges – that would be another 1200+ commits if you count those).”

It’s a big release, so it’s not possible to list all of the new features here. Please refer to the Kernelnewbies writeup for detailed information.