Char/Misc Has A Bit Of Changes All Over For Linux 5.3

The char/misc changes with each succeeding kernel release seem to have less changes to the character device subsystem itself and more just a random collection of changes not fitting in other subsystems / pull requests. With Linux 5.3 comes another smothering of different changes.

Greg Kroah-Hartman did acknowledge this growing trend when sending in the char/misc changes for Linux 5.3. "It seems that this tree is becoming the funnel point of lots of smaller driver subsystems, which is fine for me, but that's why it is getting larger over time and does not just contain stuff under drivers/char/ and drivers/misc."

Among the "char/misc" changes to find for Linux 5.3 include:

- Icelake NNPI support for the INTEL_TH driver.

- xilinx-sdfec is added as a Xilinx Soft Decision Forward Error Correction platform driver.

- Compaction / memory shrinker support for the vmw_balloon driver for virtualization.

- Many Habana Labs accelerator driver improvements. There has been talk of introducing an accelerator subsystem that would then cut-down on some of the activity like the Habana Labs driver in char/misc, but so far this new subsystem has yet to be introduced.

- Arm Coresight updates.

- An i.MX8 non-volatile memory driver has been added.

- Many Intel SoundWire low-level code changes.