Some Of The Features Expected For Linux 5.15: DG2/Alchemist, BPF Timers, DAMON + More

If all goes according to plan the Linux 5.14 kernel will be released as stable today. Linux 5.14 has many new features but there is also a lot of work slated for the next cycle, Linux 5.15. Here's a look.

Among the material we've been covering ahead of the Linux 5.15 cycle includes the following items. Stay tuned to our coverage over the next two weeks of the 5.15 merge window to see what else might be in store for this next kernel version.

- The Intel graphics driver is pushing initial DG2/Alchemist driver code building off their existing DG1 support. There is also XeHP support. Expect more DG2 and XeHP work over the next few kernel cycles. Plus they are finally removing the Cannon Lake graphics support.

- A lot of other Intel graphics improvements.

- Radeon Cyan Skillfish support as a yet-to-launch Navi 1x APU.

- A new user-space ABI for the NVIDIA Tegra driver.

- Amazon's DAMON is expected to land.

- BPF timers are set to finally be mainlined.

- The PREEMPT-RT locking infrastructure looks ready for landing and represents a bulk of the real-time (RT) work needing to be mainlined. It's possible the rest could come in the near future.

- Btrfs support for IDMAPPED mounts.

- Btrfs FS-VERITY support is also on the way.

- AMD Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring is coming to Linux 5.15 albeit belated.

- Optimized C3 sleep entry handling for AMD CPUs.

- AMD SB-RMI driver is set to land.

- Submitted already is the initial memory folios code but remains to be seen if Linus Torvalds will pull it this cycle as some developers do have concerns about it.

- An AVX2-optimized SM4 cipher implementation.

- Qualcomm Adreno 680 and Adreno 7c3 support.

- Mediatek MT8167 DRM support.

- Support for reading from the Nintendo OTP memory area for that specialized read-only memory region on the Nintendo Wii and Wii U game consoles.

- Arm SMCCC TRNG driver is ready to go.

- Cirrus Logic Dolphin audio support.

- MCTP protocol support.

- The LightNVM subsystem is being removed.

- The new NTFS driver from Paragon Software might land but isn't immediately clear right now due to a few open issues, but it's quite possible it will be merged.

- A global counter on block/disk changes is coming as motivated by systemd and Microsoft developers.

- Paranoid L1d cache flushing looks like it will try again for Linux 5.15.

- IMA-based measurements for the Device Mapper code as another Microsoft-led change to the kernel.

- Networking support for Intel Lunar Lake.

- More scalable and reliable Open vSwitch support.

- Apple Magic Mouse high resolution scrolling is finally ready.