64-Bit ARM Updates Sent In Ahead Of The Linux 5.5 Cycle

Catalin Marinas who oversees the 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture code within the mainline kernel has already submitted his pull request early for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle beginning tonight or early on Monday.

Among the ARM64 changes coming with Linux 5.5 include:

- Workaround for a Neoverse N1 bug where the processor may fetch stale instructions. There is also a workaround for Cortex A57 and A72 processors where the CPU may corrupt the TLB from wrong speculation.

- Perf subsystem updates for ARM64.

- NVIDIA Carmel CPU cores are now on the white-list for avoiding Kernel Page Table Isolation (Meltdown).

- Various other fixes and code improvements.

The complete list of ARM64 changes queued for Linux 5.5 can be found via this pull request. Linux 5.5's cycle will kickoff following the Linux 5.4 release today while the kernel will not debut as stable until around late January or early February. Linux 5.5 should be the kernel that ends up shipping in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Fedora 32, and other early 2020 Linux distributions.