Linux 5.5 Ready To Shine With Navi Overclocking, Raspberry Pi 4 Support, Wake-On-Voice
As it's been two months since the Linux 5.5 merge window and already we've been quite busy talking about material on deck for Linux 5.6, here is a look back at some of the new features and changes of Linux 5.5:
- Mainline Raspberry Pi 4 support and as part of that getting the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC support squared away.
- AMDGPU "Navi" overclocking support with OverDrive via the existing sysfs interfaces similar to earlier AMD GPUs.
- AMDGPU HDCP support.
- Continued work bringing up Intel Gen12/Xe graphics.
- Btrfs' RAID now allows three and four copy modes for RAID1 to replicate data across more drives rather than the existing two-copy support.
- Intel 5-level paging support is now enabled by default in preparing for forthcoming Intel servers with a lot more RAM.
- Support for new Loongson processors.
- The RdRand CPU extension is now "sanity tested" at boot and during resume to verify it's at least somewhat random, in addressing issues that have come up in particular with some AMD CPUs / motherboards.
- EXT4's native file-system encryption with FSCRYPT now works with smaller block sizes.
- There finally is a mainline driver for reporting NVMe solid-state drive temperatures via HWMON on sysfs rather than needing special user-space utilities (that also needed to be run as root).
- A driver for System76 ACPI Coreboot laptops.
- A new Logitech keyboard driver.
- Wake-On-Voice support for select Google Chromebooks at this point.
- KUnit as an in-kernel unit testing framework.
There also is much more to find. See our Linux 5.5 feature overview for a lengthier list of kernel changes. Linux 5.5 is most likely the kernel version to be used by the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
For as fun as Linux 5.5 is going to be, Linux 5.6 is going to be an outright massive release -- stay tuned.
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