The Many Changes & Additions To Find With The Linux 5.2 Kernel
The Linux 5.2 kernel merge window has been open for two weeks now and is expected to close today or in the next few days (there is some uncertainty due to Linus Torvalds traveling this week due to his daughter's graduation). But anyhow all of the major pull requests have already been sent in so here is a look at the new features to find with the Linux 5.2 kernel and the many other changes.
The TLDR version of the Linux 5.2 kernel is that this summer 2019 update is simply going to be massive... Among the work to get excited about in Linux 5.2 is EXT4 case-insensitive feature, Intel Sound Open Firmware support, better AMD Ryzen laptop touchpad/touchscreen support, Intel Comet Lake support, production-ready Intel Icelake/Gen11 graphics support, ARM Mali graphics drivers landed with Lima and Panfrost, the legacy IDE driver was deprecated, a brand new Realtek WiFi driver to replace the existing RTLWIFI driver, and new subsystems for Fieldbus and generic counters.
Graphics:
- Nouveau support for the GeForce GTX 1650 (TU117).
- An ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series display fix made it in.
- Intel Icelake graphics are now considered production-ready (no longer behind an experimental flag).
- Intel Elkhart Lake support was introduced.
- AMDGPU FreeSync improvements.
- The ARM Mali Lima and Panfrost drivers were merged as well as an ASpeed AST2500 SoC DRM driver.
- A quirk for dealing with the Valve Index VR headset.
Processors:
- Intel Comet Lake support appears ready with all necessary additions seemingly in place.
- Intel Agilex SoC/FPGA support.
- SMAP/SMEP-like support for POWER.
- Mainline support for the Jetson Nano, NanoPi Neo4 and other ARM boards.
- P2P DMA between PCI Express devices on AMD Zen systems is now supported.
- A Linux 5.2 IOMMU change allows for a more flexible Intel VT-d based alternative to SR-IOV with the "AUX" support.
- Some notable x86 FPU optimizations.
- New EDAC driver support for next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs.
- Better reporting of x86 CPU stack overflows to make them easier to detect during testing.
- ARM64 now reports its Spectre mitigation state via sysfs to make it much easier to track. There is also ARM preparations for Neoverse N1 processors.