Linux 5.6 Is Looking Like It Will Be Spectacular With A Long List Of Features

Among the work that's slated to land with Linux 5.6 includes:
- WireGuard finally going into the mainline kernel for this secure VPN tunnel.
- Initial USB4 support thanks to Intel's open-source developers.
- The FQ-PIE packet scheduler is being mainlined as another step to fighting bufferbloat on Linux.
- Improved AMD Zen temperature/power reporting. The k10temp driver is now in good shape for reporting the temperatures and current/voltage readings on the AMD Zen/Zen+/Zen2 processors. I've partially been testing a lot of the processors and overall it's a big improvement over the limited temperatures exposed before and no power information.
- Also on the temperature front is finally having an in-kernel SATA drive temperature reporting driver that jives with the HWMON interfaces, doesn't require root access to read, and no special user-space utilities as was previously the case.
- Btrfs Async Discard support for better TRIM/discard performance on SSDs with Btrfs.
- F2FS data compression support.
- A fix so ASUS TUF laptops with AMD CPUs will stop overheating on Linux.
- Open-source NVIDIA RTX 2000 "Turing" graphics support with hardware acceleration albeit dependent on firmware binary blobs that have yet to be published.
- AMD Pollock support was sent in as part of the graphics changes.
- AMD DP MST DSC support is all wired up.
- AMD Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is wired up for tapping the PSP / Secure Processor on Raven and newer APUs.
- Power management improvements for Radeon GPUs.
- Continued Intel graphics work on Tiger Lake and Elkhart Lake among other improvements.
- Intel SST Core-Power support.
- Faster memmove() performance for Intel Ice Lake.
- Intel MPX is finally being cleared in full.
- Obsoleting the Intel Simple Firmware Interface.
- Intel Virtual Bus introduction.
- An optimization for Intel's IGC 2.5G Ethernet driver yielding ~7% better performance.
- Possible Intel server power management improvements.
- EXT4 Direct I/O optimizations.
- FSCRYPT inline encryption.
- Supporting more Logitech drivers with the input driver code maintained by the community.
- A new GRND_INSECURE random option.
- ARMv8.5 RNG support and other new ARMv8 features.
- Starting on AMD Zen 3 enablement though not too much at this point, but it's a start.
- More Intel Jasper bring-up and other new hardware bits.
- More AVX/AVX2/AVX-512 optimizations within the kernel's crypto code.
- Prepping for finally landing multipath TCP support.
- Potentially the inclusion of Western Digital's Zonefs file-system for SMR drives.
- One item we haven't seen queued yet but hopeful it could come at the last minute is the long-awaited AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver.
- The time namespace for allowing per-namespace offsets to the system monotonic and boot-time clocks, with a container use-case in mind.
- There's even a mainline driver now for keyboard/mouse support on the SGI Octane and Onyx2. Yes, the hardware from the late 90's...
And I'm sure a lot more that I didn't yet notice in Git, but will be closely following the pull requests as always as soon as the Linux 5.6 merge window opens up... Stay tuned!
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