As usual, after the release of the RC versions of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds announces the new stable version of the kernel. So it has also been for him Linux 4.10, which comes with interesting improvements that we will now explain, highlighting the most important ones, since changes from one version to another are usually extremely numerous if we count all the corrections, code cleaning and additions that come from all the developers involved ...
Broadly speaking we can catalog improvements into three core groups, such as new security features added, fixes, and hardware support enhancements. All this is the result of the development that has been carried out during the last seven weeks, time in which up to 8 Release Candidate versions have appeared until reaching this final kernel.
Torvalds himself has recognized during the announcement that version 4.10 of the kernel has not turned out as small as expected, since after version 4.9, which was very active in terms of changes, a version 4.10 somewhat calmer in terms of news was expected. Therefore, it has resulted in about 13.000 commits, not counting the merges, that there would be about 1200 more ...
Well, as for the highlights we find the support for virtual GPUs, that is, a system to render graphics in virtual machines instead of doing it through physical hardware, which sometimes is not fine at all. Likewise, support has been incorporated for the L2 and L3 cache of the latest versions of Intel chips, as well as a tool called perf c2c to analyze the cache content in non-uniform memory access systems. The drivers for file systems such as EXT4, F2FS, XFS, OverlayFS, NFS, CIFS, UBIFS, BEFS, LOGFS, ARM architecture and AMD graphics cards, etc. have also been improved.