Some Of The Features To Look Forward To With Linux 5.7

With the Linux 5.7 cycle kicking off in April with its merge window opening upon the release of Linux 5.6, here is a look at some of the changes and new features that have been on our radar for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Among the items we have been tracking that should be landing in Linux 5.7 based upon being queued in the respective "-next" trees, those items tentatively for the 5.7 kernel include the likes of:

- The new Samsung-developed Microsoft exFAT file-system driver is queued and ready to go. This replaces the current staging exFAT driver.

- USB fast charge support for Apple iOS devices.

- Intel Tiger Lake / Gen12 graphics are now considered stable and enabled out-of-the-box.

- The Intel Gen7 graphics mitigation for the iGPU Leak vulnerability.

- A big Netfilter optimization for AVX2 Intel/AMD CPUs.

- Various AMDGPU fixes and other improvements.

- More AMD Zen 3 / Family 19h code.

- Arm thermal pressure support in the kernel for dealing with CPU cores running hot.

- An Intel PMC mux control driver for changing the mode/roles of USB-C ports.

- Zstd compression support for the F2FS file-system to complement the existing LZO and LZ4 capabilities.

- Better out-of-the-box touchscreen support.

- Intel E823 support in their ICE networking driver.

- The new TIDSS DRM driver.

- An ACPI tiny power button driver.

- Support for a new high-end USB-C audio interface, the PreSonus Studio 1810c.

- Better spreading of task utilization across cores and other scheduling improvements.

- A fix for clock drifting on old Intel Bay Trail platforms.

- Qualcomm MHI bus support for improving wireless support for Qualcomm hardware on Linux.

- A slight improvement to boot times for systems making use of NVMe solid-state storage.

- The kernel/DRM side pieces for allowing OpenGL 4.x with the VMWGFX driver for VMware guests.

- MIPS Loongson 3 support improvements for those libre-friendly Chinese manufactured MIPS64 processors.

- A new HID driver for dealing with a buggy and funky looking set of mice.

- HP 100BaseVG AnyLAN support is finally being dropped with that obscure networking support not being used widely to begin with and really only in the mid to late 90's.

- Retiring 32-bit ARM KVM virtualization support.

- WUSB and UWB support have also been dropped from the staging area.

- Cavium OCTEN driver support is being restored after previously being dropped.

- Habana Labs continuing to prep more Goya AI accelerator code.

- Improvements to the Linux kernel's floppy disk driver code.

Meanwhile, not in a "-next" branch yet but possibly coming to Linux 5.7 based upon their state elsewhere include:

- FSCRYPT inline encryption capabilities for better file encryption/decryption performance on modern SoCs.

- AMD PassThru DMA Engine support.

- AMD SB-TSI temperature driver support.

- AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver has long been sought after and currently sitting on the mailing list waiting to be queued.

- TTM huge/giant page table entries for lowering Linux CPU graphics driver usage.

- MAC + audit policy support using eBPF.

- Better Pinebook Pro ARM laptop support off mainline.

Stay tuned for the Linux 5.7 cycle kicking off in April with its merge window when more features will come to light. Linux 5.7 stable meanwhile should be out in June.