There Are Many Changes To Look Forward To With The Linux 5.10 Kernel

The Linux 5.9 kernel is expected for release this evening which will in turn kick off the Linux 5.10 merge window for the next two weeks. As we've already been closely monitoring the various "-next" development trees in recent weeks of material building up for this next cycle, here is a look at a portion of what's to come for this late 2020 kernel.

But before getting to Linux 5.10, don't forget about the exciting changes with Linux 5.9 about to be minted as stable. In looking ahead though, among the material slated for inclusion in Linux 5.10 includes:

- Much quicker hibernation and resume, well, assuming hibernation plays nicely in the first place with your system(s).

- The Nintendo Switch controller driver is being upstreamed finally into the kernel.

- SLDT/STR emulation for helping some Windows games on Wine.

- AMD Zen 3 / Ryzen 5000 series temperature monitoring support is coming to k10temp.

- AMD SME hardware-enforced cache coherency support.

- Support for larger machine check banks with future AMD CPUs.

- Zhaoxin 7-Series Centaur CPU support.

- Optional L1d flushing on context switching will try again to land in the next kernel after getting pulled from Linux 5.9.

- Intel ENQCMD / DSA preparations continue ahead of next year's Sapphire Rapids server processors.

- Intel has begun preparations for bringing up Meteor Lake.

- PowerPC 601 is being retired as the first 32-bit PowerPC processor from the early 90's.

- Intel SERIALIZE support for fending off speculative execution bugs further.

- "Ghostbusters" as a rewrite of the ARM64 Spectre mitigations.

- ARM64 Memory Tagging is now ready after missing the mark on 5.9 slightly.

- Support for Nitro Enclaves in securing critical applications.

- Intel Platform Monitoring Telemetry looks like it will make it for 5.10.

- Initial UEFI boot support for RISC-V.

- POWER coregroup support.

- A fix for some HP laptops not performing optimally when connected to AC power due to a thermal policy handling issue.

- Better support for newer Synaptics touchpad capabilities on different laptops like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1/P1.

- Improvements for newer Lenovo laptops as part of Lenovo's Linux push.

- A new driver for Chromebook "Vivaldi" keyboards.

- Mediatek MT76 WiFi driver improvements.

- Broadcom 200G Ethernet support is on the way.

- EXT4 fast commits as a big performance for those running the EXT4 file-system in the ordered journal mode.

- RAID10 DISCARD improvements that can lead to much faster mkfs performance.

- EXT4 also has an optimization concerning file overwrites when operating in direct access or direct I/O modes.

- A generic case-folding implementation for file-systems.

- Intel MAX10 BMC hardware monitoring via a new driver.

- Creative SoundBlaster AE-7 sound card support.

- More Radeon RX 6000 / RDNA 2 enablement work.

- PCIe DPC recovery for AMD graphics cards.

- Various Intel Gen12 / Xe graphics fixes and improvements.

- Intel Tiger Lake HOBL support for better battery life.

- Support for Matrox G200 desktop graphics cards.

- DisplayPort support for the Qualcomm MSM driver as well as per-process pagetables.

- Raspberry Pi 4 VC4 support has finally made it!

- Sound output support for the Intel DG1 graphics card.

- BFP debugging improvements.

- HPE/SGI UV5 architectural support.

- Faster reading from /dev/zero.

Stay tuned for even more changes over the next two weeks of the Linux 5.10 merge window. After that, benchmarks!