Linus Torvalds finally announced Linux kernel 4.10. Initially Torvalds planned for it to be a small release with not so many commits. However, he ended up with an “average” kernel release with more than 13000 commits.

The new release includes a number of improvements and updates. Probably the most noticeable feature is adding support for using virtual GPUs via gVirt. By using KVM now, you would be able to deploy a virtual GPU and install the official drivers for it. According to the team who introduced this technology[ref]Intel Developers: https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc14/technical-sessions/presentation/tian [/ref], it would give a 95% performance match as if it was a native GPU. Which is definitely great for virtualization. There were some other solutions for using vGPU. But the new technology is considered “full”. Taking it to the next level.

Watch the following video to learn more about the new introduced KVGMT technology:

 

Kernel 4.10 also adds a tool called perf c2c. Which maintains analyzes for memory access and usage for NUMA systems, trying to prevent memory access clashing by different threads.

Improved writeback management, better support for ARM devices, allowing attaching ePBF programs to cgroups, experimental MD raid5 writeback cache and FAILFAST support and Intel L2/L3 CPU caches support were also some improvements included in Linux kernel 4.10.

Other than that. The new release contains what every normal kernel release would contain: More drivers, better memory allocation and lot of bug-fixes for varoius things in the kernel. For a detailed release notes, check Kernel Newbies.

If you are using a rolling release distribution, probably the new version is already in the repositories. However, for other distributions, you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks before it reaches you. If you are excited for the new version and you are using Debian / Ubuntu based distributions, you can grab the binary packages now from the Ubuntu Kernel PPA Mainline.

Linux kernel 4.10 can be downloaded from kernel.org. Good luck in compiling!

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