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