Some Of The Features You Can Expect To See With Linux 5.11: Lots From AMD, Intel

The Linux 5.10 kernel is expected to be released this Sunday that will in turn start the Linux 5.11 merge window. Based on the material queued so far into the various "-next" branches, here is a look at what should be on the table for this next major kernel release and come February will be the first major kernel release of 2021.

Among the likely Linux 5.11 material that we have been tracking includes:

- AMD VanGogh APU and RDNA2 Dimgrey Cavefish support. There is also Green Sardine, AMDGPU power management improvements, and other ongoing improvements for recent and forthcoming AMD Radeon graphics hardware.

- Intel Integer Scaling support!

- More Intel DG1 enablement work around their discrete graphics card offerings.

- More Intel Gen12 LP / Tiger Lake fixes and other improvements.

- Intel Keem Bay display support with that new driver.

- TTM multihop support and other TTM memory improvements.

- The MSM Qualcomm Adreno DRM driver can now make use of the System Cache / LLC for helping with performance.

- Mediatek DRM driver support for the MT8167.

- Syscall User Dispatch has been queued up as important for Wine/Proton with modern Windows apps/games making system calls directly.

- The Habana Labs AI accelerator driver has begun preparing for new hardware past Goya and Gaudi.

- The Linux kernel is seeing the introduction of the Auxiliary Bus.

- KASLR is finally working for Loongson64.

- In the name of power/thermal, Intel has added an interface for passing workload hints to the kernel for their INT340X code for recent Intel SoCs.

- AMD EPYC 7003 support in the AMD_Energy driver.

- AMD Zen1/Zen2/Zen3 RAPL PowerCap support.

- Also new on the AMD side is the AMD SoC PMC driver.

- Perhaps most exciting for AMD laptop owners is finally seeing the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver mainlined for benefiting many Ryzen notebooks with that sensor functionality now working under Linux.

An "inhibited" feature for input devices to temporarily disregard/ignore input on select hardware such as for convertible notebooks.

- Lenovo ThinkPad palm sensor support.

- Guitar Hero Live PS3 / Wii U dongle support.

- Support for Sega Saturn controllers connected via USB.

- Support for newer ASUS gaming laptop keyboards.

- Pioneer DDJ-RR DJ controller support within the Linux kernel's audio code.

- Support for Intel's Maple Ridge Thunderbolt controller.

- A new driver for checking if Thunderbolt / USB4 ports are functional.

- F2FS now supports casefolding with encryption together where as before the two were not supported concurrently.

- H.264 stateless decoding looks like it will leave staging.

- PCH temperature monitoring for Intel's C620 series chipsets after it was mistakenly left out for years.

- A Corsair PSU HWMON driver for exposing the sensors on these higher-end Corsair power supplies with LINK functionality.

- It looks like SGX Enclaves support might be ready as the patches have made it to an x86/sgx branch in the TIP Git repository, so we'll see if it makes it in at long last...

- Continued IO_uring improvements.

Stay tuned for the Linux 5.11 merge window over the next two weeks. But first is the Linux 5.10 LTS christening this weekend with its shiny new features for ending out 2020.