Linux 5.5 Block Changes Include NVMe Temperature Monitoring, Optimizations

The Linux 5.5 block changes landed earlier this week with a wide variety of driver and core improvements. There are some I/O optimizations to make the pull exciting as well as the NVMe HWMON drive temperature reporting integration.

As outlined before, the NVMe HWMON support is here with Linux 5.5. This allows reading the NVMe solid-state drive temperatures via sysfs/hwmon just as you can normally do with the other hardware monitoring sensors on Linux systems. Up until now you needed the NVMe user-space utilities installed and generally had to run it as root in order to see drive temperatures. Now with Linux 5.5 you don't need to install anything extra and the drive temperatures are reported via sysfs/hwmon for easy integration with various Linux system monitoring programs. I tried it out on a few boxes so far and is working well -- though the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA isn't yet shipping their builds with CONFIG_NVME_HWMON set yet, so be aware if that is normally where you fetch your Git kernel builds.

Other block work includes small I/O optimizations, better block stats tracking, a lot of IO_uring changes continue in making it more featureful, better zoned device support, MD changes, continued BCache tweaking, and other work as seen via the Git activity.