The Many Changes & Additions To Find With The Linux 5.2 Kernel
File-Systems / Storage:
- Optional support for per-directory case-insensitive file/folder support for EXT4.
- Better SMR drive support for F2FS.
- The Andrew File-System (AFS) can now run the likes of Firefox and GNOME following some file-locking changes to satisfy SQLite databases.
- The Linux legacy IDE driver has been deprecated though this isn't IDE itself with the libATA-based IDE drivers still expected to stick around. The legacy IDE driver is expected to be removed in 2021.
- Useful fixes and improvements for Btrfs.
- A big pile of new stuff for XFS.
Other Hardware:
- Improved AMD Ryzen laptop support thanks to the new PCIe MP2 driver.
- Other laptop support improvements.
- Restored hibernation support for various Intel Baytrail/Cherrytrail systems.
- The GPIO vibrator driver was merged along with other input updates (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.2-Input-Updates).
- Support for Intel Sound Open Firmware in the audio drivers.
- The NVIDIA AltMode driver was added for enabling VirtualLink device support with new Turing graphics cards that feature USB-C connections.
- The new Realtek RTW88 WiFi driver for different chipsets and a replacement to the RTLWIFI driver that was in staging but now removed.
- In addition to the Realtek RTW88 driver, other networking additions including a new Mediatek driver, Intel Dynamic Device Personalization, and various optimizations to existing drivers.
- Long out-of-tree Daktronics driver code was merged.
- Better Logitech wireless device support.
- The U2F Zero driver was added for that libre hardware device offering two factor authentication and hardware random number generator features.
- Improved Thunderbolt support on older Apple systems.
Other Kernel Happenings:
- The merging of the NULL TTY driver.
- Linux 5.2's live-patching support now makes use of a GCC9 compiler feature that might have minor performance implications.
- Progress towards enabling -Wimplicit-fallthrough.
- The new Fieldbus subsystem is added for industrial controls.
- The "mitigations=" kernel parameter controls though this was back-ported to current stable kernel series with the introduction of the MDS/Zombieload mitigations.
- Zstd-compressed perf records.
- Also new is a Generic Counters infrastructure.
- A last minute change now is faster vmalloc performance.
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