The Many New Features & Improvements Of The Linux 5.0 Kernel

Linux Storage / File-Systems

- Fscrypt Adiantum support for helping with fast data encryption on low-end hardware lacking native CPU extensions for accelerated crypto. This is Google's replacement to their prior plan of using NSA's Speck for low-end device data encryption.

- Minor FBDEV improvements and fixes.

- F2FS fixes now that Google is supporting the Flash-Friendly File-System on their Pixel devices.

- The Binderfs implementation for accessing Android's Binder inter-process communication mechanism from within containers.

- EXT4 fixes and XFS fixes.

- The Btrfs file-system restores support for swap files.

Networking

- Retpoline overhead reduction work to help offset some of the performance penalties introduced last year with the Spectre V2 mitigation.

- Realtek R8169 driver improvements.

- Aquantia AQtion USB to 2.5/5Gb Ethernet adapter support with a new driver.

- Other networking changes too but sadly WireGuard wasn't added.

Other Hardware

- Logitech High Resolution Scrolling support for more precise scroll wheel events on various Logitech mice.

- Cougar 700K gaming keyboard support.

- Raspberry Pi Touchscreen driver was finally merged.

- Better Thunderbolt protection against potentially malicious devices thanks to this new IOMMU work.

- ECC EDAC support for the Xilinx ZynqMP DDR controller.

- Various x86 laptop driver updates.

- AMD Audio Co-Processor 3.x support and other sound hardware updates.

- Cedrus video driver improvements for Allwinner SoCs.

- Mainline support for the Chameleon96 Intel FPGA board that is priced around $129 USD.

Other

- Lots of tiny staging updates including work on the new EROFS file-system, MOST subsystem, continued VirtualBox video driver clean-ups, and other staging drivers.

- A lot of x86_64 KVM work including STIBP support, Processor Tracing virtualization, new Intel Icelake CPU instruction set extensions support, and other work.

- Various power management updates.

- The ARM Energy Model Framework was merged.

- A new console font for HiDPI and retina screens.

- The Adiantum and Streebog crypto algorithms were added. Adiantum is used now by fscrypt for the speedy data encryption while Streebog is a hashing function developed by the Russian FSB agency. There are also some crypto performance improvements too this cycle for existing implementations.

- DMA mapping updates to offset some Retpoline performance losses.

- Continued work preparing for Year 2038 with the Y2038 problem.

- Merging of the new I3C subsystem.

That's at least all of the interesting kernel work I spotted for Linux 5.0. If I missed anything, feel free to let me know via the forums or Twitter. It's certainly going to be a big kernel release! Stay tuned for Linux 5.0 kernel benchmarks beginning on Phoronix in the days ahead.