Linux 5.14 Set To See Many New Features, New GPU Support, Other Exciting Changes
Linux 5.13 features are quite exciting while as is usually the case, we are already salivating for what should be in Linux 5.14.
While the merge window hasn't formally opened yet and at times Linus Torvalds does reject pull requests, based on my monitoring of the "-next" Git branches over the past number of weeks, here is a look at functionality currently queued up in respective maintainer/subsystem Git branches ahead of Linux 5.14 kicking off. The AMD graphics driver has some great work going on, continued Intel work around Alder Lake, Lenovo and Dell laptop support improvements, a new Microsoft DRM driver, and much more.
- Mainline support for the Raspberry Pi 400.
- Profile Guided Optimizations for the kernel are likely to land when using the Clang compiler.
- Dell hardware privacy support.
- Support for the OpenPOWER Microwatt soft CPU core.
- The core-scheduling interface should land for helping hyperscalers and others helping to mitigate the security risk of SMT/HT.
- Support for configuring ThinkPad BIOS settings from within Linux on supported devices with the new Think-LMI driver.
- AMD Yellow Carp GPU support as a new RDNA2 variant.
- AMD Beige Goby GPU support.
- AMDGPU HMM SVM support.
- Proper handling for AMDGPU GPU hot-plug.
- AMD Smart Shift support for Linux laptops.
- AMDGPU reporting of throttler status to know why the GPU might be throttled.
- The SimpleDRM driver will be mainlined.
- Qualcomm Adreno 660 GPU support.
- Intel's DRM driver is working to make use of TTM for local device memory management.
- Intel Alder Lake P graphics support as well as XeLPD display enablement.
- Other Intel Alder Lake and Xe Graphics work.
- XFS file-system scalability work.
- F2FS read-only feature.
- A compress cache feature for F2FS.
- AMD Sensor Fusion Hub support for newer Ryzen laptops.
- Microsoft Hyper-V DRM display driver is finally being mainlined.
- XMM fast hypercalls for Hyper-V in KVM.
- Habana Labs AI driver improvements.
- A new input driver for a $10 open-source joystick for use with DIY/hobyist devices.
- Better support for MikroTik 10G/25G NICs.
- Intel IOSM M.2 modem driver is going into the kernel.
- Intel IGC network driver support for AF_XDP zero-copy.
- NVMeTCP Offload work to lower CPU utilization and yield lower latency.
- Latency reduction work for USB audio devices.
- Initial support around the ACPI Platform Runtime Mechanism.
- Transparent hugepages for RISC-V.
- Intel Alder Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 support.
- Intel P-State preparations for hybrid processors initially with Alder Lake.
- Improvements in thermal code around hot NVIDIA Tegra devices.
- Support for old Motorola 68000 systems moving off Linux's deprecated IDE code.
- A big Device Mapper optimization.
- EXT4 journal checkpoints from user-space for extra privacy.
- Retiring of the RAW driver for I/O access.
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