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Linux 5.6 Is The Most Exciting Kernel In Years With So Many New Features - Phoronix

The Linux 5.6 merge window is anticipated to be ending today followed by the Linux 5.6-rc1 test release. This kernel is simply huge: there is so many new and improved features with this particular release that it's mind-boggling. I'm having difficulty remembering such a time a kernel release was so large.

The quick summary of Linux 5.6 changes include: WireGuard, USB4, open-source NVIDIA RTX 2000 series support, AMD Pollock enablement, lots of new hardware support, a lot of file-system / storage work, multi-path TCP bits are finally going mainline, Year 2038 work beginning to wrap-up for 32-bit systems, the new AMD TEE driver for tapping the Secure Processor, the first signs of AMD Zen 3, better AMD Zen/Zen2 thermal and power reporting under Linux, at long last having an in-kernel SATA drive temperature for HWMON, and a lot of other kernel infrastructure improvements. In our original monitoring of the kernel mailing list and Git activity, the big highlights for Linux 5.6 that have us excited include:

Processors / Platforms:

- Continued bring-up of Intel Jasper Lake, Tiger Lake, and Elkhart Lake platforms along with some missing Comet Lake PCI IDs in different drivers.

- A new, generic CPU idle cooling thermal driver.

- Linux 5.6 has mainline support for the Amazon Echo.

- Many other new ARM SoCs and boards supported.

- Continued Intel Gateway SoC enablement.

- Ingenic X1000 SoC support.

- Intel MPX support is completely removed.

- ASUS laptops with AMD Ryzen CPUs will stop overheating / severely down-clocking.

- Faster memmove() for Intel Ice Lake.

- Various x86 code improvements.

- The first tiny bits of AMD Family 19h support (Zen 3).

- The AMD k10temp driver finally starts reporting voltage/current for Zen CPUs and numerous thermal reporting improvements. This is a big step forward thanks to the community but unfortunate these Zen/Zen2 thermal/power reporting bits have taken so long and there are still some mysteries that remain.

Graphics:

- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 Turing support with the open-source Nouveau driver that can offer hardware acceleration but still relies upon the binary firmware (to be released) and yet to be made NVC0 Gallium3D changes for OpenGL support.

- AMD Pollock support.

- AMDGPU reset support for Renoir and Navi.

- Continued Intel Gen11 and Gen12 graphics improvements.

- Many other DRM driver changes.

- Media driver improvements for Rockchip SoCs.

File-Systems / Storage:

- Async DISCARD support for Btrfs for better efficiency/performance.

- Experimental compression support for F2FS.

- EXT4 performance fixes.

- The Zonefs file-system for zoned block devices is likely to land, but as of writing the pull request has yet to be acted upon for this Western Digital contribution.

- NFSD now supports server-to-server copies building upon the previously-merged NFS client support for SSC.

- The NFS client meanwhile can now use a cache if the NFS server connection is lost.

- Fixes for NVMe and BFQ.

- Performance enhancements for FS-VERITY.

Virtualization:

- KVM adds protections for Spectre V1 / L1TF combination attacks.

- After being ejected from its short-lived time in Linux 5.4, the VirtualBox Shared Folder driver (VBOXSF) is set to make a return for offering shared folders between guests and the host with Oracle VM VirtualBox where as up to now it has relied upon the out-of-tree Guest Additions package.

- Better AMD APIC virtualization support with Dynamic APICv.

- Continued work on Intel VT-d Nested Mode support.

Networking:

- WireGuard was finally merged for this secure VPN tunnel.

- The first portion of Multi-Path TCP was finally mainlined.

- Intel 2.5G driver performance improvements.

- The FQ-PIE packet scheduler for fighting bufferbloat.

- Intel Virtual Bus support.

- Other networking work like continued advancements to the ath11k code.

General Hardware:

- Initial USB4 support.

- Continued Logitech input device improvements.

- New Qualcomm drivers were mainlined.

- Various laptop quirks.

- Intel continues advancing the Sound Open Firmware.

- The Simple Firmware Interface is finally obsolete.

- A mainline driver for the SGI Octane and Onyx2 keyboard/mouse.

General Improvements:

- The new AMD TEE driver for exposing trusted execution on the Secure Processor with Raven APUs.

- Linux 5.6 is the first kernel for 32-bit systems ready to run past Year 2038 given the Unix timestamp issue. Granted, plenty of user-space software still needs to be updated to handle the Y2038 issue.

- Staging cleaning saw it lightening the kernel by 30k+ lines of code thanks to removing old drivers.

- /dev/random now behaves more like /dev/urandom.

- Linux 5.6 paired with Clang 10 can build a working IBM s390 kernel, joining Arm and x86_64 with the Clang'ing kernel action.

- The new openat2 system call.

- pidfd_getfd ioctl provides new interesting use-cases including for web browsers.

- The time namespace has been added.

- Linus Torvalds himself made a change to the kernel's pipe code that in particular should help with GNU Make parallel jobs performance when compiling code.

Benchmarks forthcoming of Linux 5.6 and other coverage. Look for Linux 5.6-rc1 to be released tonight if all goes well will be released either at the very end of March or more than likely early April.

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Linux 5.6 Is The Most Exciting Kernel In Years With So Many New Features - Phoronix
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