Linux 5.20 To Bring New Intel & AMD Hardware Support, IO_uring Features & Much More
Linux 5.19 is great and has many new features but of course we are always excited about "N + 1" and for weeks have been monitoring the mailing lists and Git repositories on the lookout for expected v5.20 material. Some of the kernel changes expected for Linux 5.20 includes:
- It's possible PREEMPT_RT could land for Linux 5.20! There still are a few remaining last minute items but it's looking very close like these long-in-the-works real-time patches could be ready for 5.20.
- Rust might be submitted for Linux 5.20 with that initial Rust programming language infrastructure. This though is just a "maybe", so we'll see if that happens or not for the Linux 5.20 merge window for that infrastructure and basic sample code / driver bits.
- IO_uring zero copy support.
- IO_uring user-space block driver is being introduced for new use-cases.
- Intel SGX2 support appears ready for mainline.
- AMD Zen CPUs will now use MWAIT over HALT as an HPC optimization
- Fixing touchpad/keyboard issues after suspend with some TUXEDO and Clevo laptops.
- AMD has continued working a lot on RDNA3 graphics processor enablement and other new hardware features. Hopefully Linux 5.20 is in good enough shape for the RDNA3 launch day, but due to their block-by-block enablement strategy it's not entirely clear... But fingers crossed that Linux 5.20 will be good enough for RDNA3 at launch.
- Intel DG2/Alchemist desktop graphics cards and ATS-M are approaching usability with Linux 5.20 and Mesa 22.2. The desktop PCI IDs are now added. However, for Linux 5.20 there still is the force-probe option needed but aside from that things appear to be getting ironed out for the forthcoming Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs.
- Early bits for Intel's Ponte Vecchio Xe HPC.
- Initial Meteor Lake graphics support but more of that enablement is coming to a later kernel... Just the very basic PCI IDs and platform information for v5.20.
- More Intel work around Raptor Lake.
- Faster console scrolling at boot for old FBDEV drivers.
- Raspberry Pi 4 V3D open-source GPU kernel driver support.
- MSM DRM driver support for Qualcomm's Adreno 619 GPU.
- Panfrost support for the Arm Mali Valhall hardware.
- Some display code changes for Nouveau but nothing exciting from the end-user side.
- 64-bit Arm is enabling THP SWAP for better swapping performance.
- AMD Zen 4 temperature monitoring and other Zen 4 CPU enablement work continues.
- Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" power management improvements to ensure the CPU cores can hit their lowest power idle states with AMX enabled and allowing C1 and C1E C-states at the same time when paired with new Sapphire Rapids firmware..
- RISC-V's default kernel configuration allows Snaps and Docker with flipping more features on by default.
- AMD Sensor Fusion Hub 1.1 support.
- Btrfs Send Stream v2 support.
- XFS improvements for large core count systems.
- Async buffered writes for XFS and IO_uring for a performance boost.
- Hardware sensor support for more ASUS motherboards.
- Intel Habana Labs Gaudi2 support.
- Support for the XP-PEN Deco L drawing tablet.
- Linux's VMEbus is being demoted.
The VIA OpenChrome graphics driver wants to go mainline but hasn't been queued yet. MGLRU is another big kernel feature we're hoping to see submitted for v5.20.
Stay tuned for coverage of the Linux 5.20 merge window on Phoronix followed by benchmarks of the Linux 5.20 kernel once things settle down.
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