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Linux Kernel 4.8 Getting Microsoft Surface 3 Touchscreen Support, RC1 Out Now

And if you’re in search of new themes that look good on your PC running the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the so-called Arc Windows 10 theme is at least worth a chance. While Linux distros are possible to run on some Surface tablets on which flawlessness is not exempted too.

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Other updates for the version include core networking, performance, core kernel, VFS and low-level filesystem changes, Torvalds said. While some of the issues he raised have been addressed, he says that the presence of Linux represents a “new potential attack surface” that users need to be aware of.

“This seems to be building up to be one of the bigger releases lately, but let’s see how it all ends up”, Torvalds said in a mailing list post. “The merge window has been fairly normal, although the patch itself looks somewhat unusual”.

“If you ignore the documentation format change, things look fairly regular, with about 60% of the non-documentation diffs being drivers (gpu, networking, media, sound, etc) and about 15% being arch updates (arm, powerpc and x86 dominate, but there’s mips and s390 too)”.

In addition to the touchscreen controller driver for Surface 3, Dmitry Torokhov also supplied a driver for the Pegasus Mobile NoteTaker tablet, a driver for Atmel capacitive touch buttons, drivers for the Raydium I2C touchscreen controllers, and a PowerKey driver for the HISI 65xx system on a chip (SoC). If you’re an early adopter and would like to take Linux kernel 4.8 for a test drive, you can download the Release Candidate 1 milestone right now from kernel.org or via our website.

There’s speculation that the final release of Linux kernel 4.8 should run amazingly well on the Atom-based Surface 3 tablet, even better than Microsoft’s own Windows 10 platform.

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Linux on Windows does not run inside of a Hyper-V hypervisor, which potentially could isolate the Linux processes.

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