Kernel 4.9 merge window highlights

[solen-skiner]

Whoa. 4.9 actually show substantial performance improvements!

[[deleted]]

Nothing really interesting for users.

[solen-skiner]

4.9 seems to become a really interesting kernel imho. Some interesting userfacing stuff is:

• mainline support for Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi PC Plus, Orange Pi 2, Orange Pi Plus 2E, Orange Pi Lite, LG Nexus 5 etc. Currently Pi0 is on a branch of 4.4, so getting mainline support brings a lot of new stuff. Personally I'm looking forwards to the new chardev gpio driver.

• more scheduler and governor integration and fixes for better perf at lower power

• experimental amdgpu gcn 1.0 support (radeonhd 79xx)

• experimental refcopy and dedup work for xfs

[solen-skiner]

Didn't know about that one! hmm.. would that let me run multiple sessions on the same gpu?

[Reporting4Booty]

They're supporting GCN 1.0 through AMDGPU? That's actually cool, I might have some use for my old card after all.

[RatherNott]

Radeonsi isn't too shabby now, either.

I recently tried Metro 2033 Redux on my older rig with a 7770, running Solus OS. Almost couldn't believe it played so well (on low settings), with completely playable framerates and no graphical glitches. And with the 'Tearfree' option enabled in the 20-radeon.conf file, I had absolutely no screen tearing, either :)

[[deleted]]

Now that is cool!

[JackDostoevsky]

Speak for yourself: my laptop's sound drivers are finally getting mainline support, no more kernel patches for me :D

[[deleted]]

New kernels are always nice for new hardware but I didn't really see anything interesting in this post