With 4.4, Linux now offers much improved support for Intel's new Skylake processor family. Intel claims that Skylake has double the performance and triple the battery life of that five-year old laptop still in your bag because it's "good enough." Without deep operating system support, such as Linux now offers, that improved functionality is largely hidden.
The Linux kernel 4.4 also offers better support for ARM's 64-bit processors and Qualcomm's high-bandwidth capable Snapdragon 820. The popular makers' Raspberry Pi system also has better graphics support thanks to a beta Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) driver.
People who run Linux in a virtual machine (VM) will be pleased that the new virtio-gpu driver enables virtualization guests to use the host graphics card efficiently. "In this release, it allows the virtualization guest to use the capabilities of the host GPU to accelerate 3D rendering. In practice, this means that a virtualized Linux guest can run a game while using the host's GPU acceleration. This makes running games on Linux VMs much faster. To use this, you'll need a VM that uses Linux's native VM hypervisor, KVM, and QEMU 2.5."
