Linus Torvalds has given the world version 4.14 of the Linux Kernel.
Torvalds announced the new release with his usual lack of fanfare, but with a couple of interesting nuggets of news.
He opened by saying “it is probably worth pointing out how the 0day robot has been getting even better (it was very useful before, but Fengguang has been working on making it even better, and reporting the problems it has found).” Said robot is an automated vulnerability-checker that scours kernel code for issues. With version 4.14 slated to be the next kernel version to receive Long Term Support, and that support now running for six years instead of two, a more secure release will be widely welcome.
Also in version 4.14 you’ll find: Heterogeneous Memory Management, which will allow GPUs to access an application’s memory space. The addition should make Linux a far better platform for GPU-intensive applications like machine learning; No kernel firmware in the tree, as the powers that be feel it doesn’t belong there; Improvements from Red Hat to make Linux a better Hyper-V guest; Preparation for Intel’s forthcoming Cannonlake processors; A vibrator driver. No. Not that sort of vibrator! This one’s for the buzzer in Motorola’s forthcoming Droid 4 phone;
Torvalds also points out that he added a “’leaking_addresses’ perl script, which is actually under active development, but I put the first version in for 4.14 just so that people could see that initial state and start looking at the end result and perhaps ask themselves “should my code make these kernel addresses visible to user space.”
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/12/linux_4_14_released/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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