Linux 5.18 Features Include Many AMD & Intel Additions, Tesla FSD Chip, Other Changes

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 4 April 2022 at 09:30 AM EDT. Page 2 of 2. 1 Comment.

Other Hardware Additions/Changes:

- Improved sensor monitoring for newer ASUS motherboards.

- More Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement.

- NVIDIA's Tegra video decode driver has been promoted out of staging in the media subsystem.

- New input drivers for the Mediatek MT6779 keypad and Imagis touchscreens.

- ACPI Platform Profile support now works correctly for AMD-powered ThinkPads.

- More x86 Android tablet driver workarounds.

- Continued improvements for Apple Keyboard support.

- A HID driver for keyboards with quirky SigmaMicro ICs.

- The Razer HID driver for Razer keyboards/devices that are not fully HID compliant.

- Many networking updates as usual.

- Fixing the thermal policy for some HP Omen notebooks.

- Intel Alder Lake "PS" audio support.

Storage / File-Systems:

- ReiserFS has been deprecated with plans to remove the file-system driver in 2025.

- EXT4's fast commit feature should be faster and more scalable.

- Two important changes to exFAT for allowing trailing dots in paths and no longer clearing "VolumeDirty" as important for avoiding artificially shortening the life of the storage device.

- Underlying work in preparing the read-only EROFS to support new features.

- Ceph addresses "a pretty nasty problem" and makes other improvements.

- More improvements to XFS.

- NFSD support for the NFSv4 birth time file attribute for file creation times.

- Performance improvements for F2FS.

- Btrfs adds encoded I/O support and faster fsync.

- FSCRYPT adding direct I/O support for encrypted files.

- New IO_uring features and speed-ups.

- Many block and NVMe optimizations including never-ending work on more efficient I/O / lower overhead.

- Intel Raptor Lake audio support.

Security:

- 64-bit Arm now supports the Shadow Call Stack (SCS).

- The new random.trust_bootloader option is added along with other RNG changes, including some significant random improvements led by Jason Donenfeld.

- The Xen USB driver was hardened against possible malicious hosts.

- AVX acceleration for the SM3 crypto path along with various Arm optimizations elsewhere in the crypto subsystem.

Other Kernel happenongs:

- x86/x86_64 defconfig builds are now using -Werror by default for pushing compiler warnings as errors to help ensure better code quality.

- More flexible LLVM/Clang compiler handling with support for version postfixed version strings and LLVM/Clang support when installed outside of the PATH.

- The tree-wide change for switching from zero length arrays to flexible array members.

- Switching from C89 to C11 for the targeted C language version.

- DAMON adds the "DAMOS" sysfs configuration control interface.

Stay tuned for more Linux 5.18 kernel benchmarks coming on Phoronix shortly to evaluate these changes.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.