Linux 5.13-rc2 Released With A VGA Text Mode Fix

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 16 May 2021 at 08:08 PM EDT. 7 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
The second weekly release candidate is now available for Linux 5.13.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the brief 5.13-rc2 announcement, "Things look pretty normal: rc2 tends to be fairly quiet as people start finding issues, and while 5.13 looks to be a pretty big release over-all, the changes in rc2 are if anything slightly smaller than average. But it's well within the noise. The fixes here are all over the place - drivers, arch updates, documentation, tooling.. Nothing particularly stands out, although a fix for some VGA text-mode font size issues is funny (as in "strange", not "ha-ha funny") just because so few people presumably use the extended SVGA text modes any more. That's not recent breakage either."

Details on that "strange" VGA text mode font issue fix via this merge, " These have been verified with true VGA hardware (a Trident TVGA8900 ISA video adapter) using various combinations of `svgatextmode' and `setfont' command invocations to change both the VT size and the font size, and also switching between the text console and X11, both by starting/stopping the X server and by switching between VTs. All this to ensure bringing the behaviour of VGA text console back to correct operation as it used to be with Linux 2.6.18."

One new item worth mentioning in Linux 5.13-rc2 is some AMD SEV code restructuring in preparations for SEV-SNP feature work to come in a future merge window.

See our Linux 5.13 feature overview for the lengthy list of new features and improvements with this kernel version.
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