Linux 5.4 Cycle To Begin With exFAT Driver, EPYC Improvements & New GPU Support
![LINUX KERNEL](/assets/categories/linuxkernel.webp)
The Linux 5.3 features are aplenty while always the N+1 kernel release looks even more exciting. Some of the material we've been tracking that is likely to be merged for Linux 5.4 includes:
- Finally there will be mainline exFAT support for that Microsoft file-system with it finally being blessed to be supported under Linux/open-source. The exFAT driver still has a lot of improvements to go (the current code quality has been called horrible) but is already making progress within staging.
- Cleaning up of Intel CPU naming conventions within the kernel code.
- Early enablement work on Intel Tigerlake "Gen 12" Xe graphics. There is also continued polishing to the Gen 11 graphics support.
- Fixes to the open-source NVIDIA driver, Nouveau.
- Initial driver support for AMD Renoir APUs as well as Navi 12/14 and Arcturus GPU support are all being added to the AMDGPU kernel driver for Linux 5.4.
- Many AMDGPU fixes.
- Per-process address space support for the Etnaviv driver and other improvements for open-source Vivante graphics.
- Initial bits for the Intel Lightning Mountain SoC.
- Deprecating Wireless USB and Ultra Wideband subsystems.
- Improved fscrypt file encryption handling.
- Kernel system wakeups are to be reported via sysfs.
- Dropping of older Intel XScale CPU support.
- RISC-V KVM support.
- Intel Icelake Thunderbolt support is finally ready.
- Support for Lenovo's ThinkPad PrivacyGuard screen protection feature as well as other x86 laptop driver improvements.
- Kernel Lockdown has been sent in after 40+ rounds of revisions/review though we'll see if Linus Torvalds is now content enough with it to honor the pull request where as previously it was rejected.
- VirtIO-FS is a new file-system driver being added.
- EROFS is graduating from staging for this read-only file-system developed by Huawei.
- Improved load balancing for AMD EPYC servers.
- AMD EPYC Rome EDAC support.
- Faster case-insensitive look-ups for F2FS.
- The SGI One-Wire driver is being added for helping SGI hardware going back to the Origin.
- Lenovo Yoga C630 laptop support in the form of the necessary DeviceTree additions.
- Meanwhile buttons on the newer Microsoft Surface laptops will finally be supported.
- k10temp support for Ryzen 3000 series CPUs.
- ASpeed AST2600 series support for that yet to be released server management processor / BMC.
Stay tuned for more information on the Linux 5.4 cycle and subsequent benchmarks in the days/weeks ahead on Phoronix.
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