Linux 5.14 Features Aplenty With New AMD GPUs, SmartShift, More Alder Lake, Core Scheduling

Today marks the 30th birthday of Linux since it was announced by Linus Torvalds. Meanwhile in just a few days the Linux 5.14 kernel is expected to be released as stable. Here is a look back at the most prominent features coming for this kernel release.

In our close monitoring and testing of Linux 5.14 over the past number of weeks, here is what has us most excited with this forthcoming kernel:

- Continued bring-up around Intel Alder Lake support. Some more pieces / device IDs are still landing for Linux 5.15 but it appears Linux 5.14 should have Alder Lake in fairly good shape... One of the big additions for 5.14 was having Alder Lake P graphics support enabled. The elephant remains though around Thread Director with there not yet being any Linux scheduler patches -- queued or otherwise staging -- around Thread Director on Linux.

- Core scheduling was merged with an aim to make Intel Hyper Threading safer for hyperscalers / public cloud providers given the various security issues that have come to light around SMT/HT.

- New AMD graphics support in Linux 5.14 include the Yellow Carp and Beige Goby GPUs being supported.

- AMD SmartShift laptops are now supported under Linux for that dynamic power sharing/budgeting between the GPU and CPU

- Dell Hardware Privacy laptop features are now supported under Linux.

- The Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer is now supported by the mainline kernel.

- Support for secret memory areas with MEMFD_SECRET.

- RISC-V now supports transparent hugepages and KFENCE, among other newer kernel features being enabled for the RISC-V architecture code.

- The legacy IDE driver code was removed to focus on the libata-based support exclusively moving forward.

See the complete Linux 5.14 feature overview for a more extensive list of all the changes coming with this kernel version in time for the autumn Linux distribution releases.