Linux 5.10 Brings Many Changes From Better CPU Support To File-System Optimizations
Storage:
- XFS now supports timestamps to Year 2486 rather than Year 2038. XFS will now deprecate the V4 file-system format in 2030. XFS will also deprecate old Irix tweaks in 2025.
- Fsync performance optimizations for Btrfs.
- F2FS improvements including the Age Threshold Garbage Collector, faster file decompression support, NVMe ZNS support, generic casefolding, and more.
- A "volatile" option for OverlayFS to yield faster performance but where syncs are omitted.
- The nosymfollow mount option is added and similar to BSDs for improving system security. The work was led by Google as part of their ChromeOS effort.
- EXT4 now supports fast commits and faster file overwite performance in DIO/DAX modes.
- NFS client support for READ_PLUS that can help with allowing faster read performance of sparse files.
- A DAX mode for FUSE to yield faster performance primarily for VirtIO-FS.
- RAID10 DISCARD improvements.
- Quicker hibernation and resume.
Other Hardware:
- Continued work on USB4 support.
- Hardening against possible DMA attacks by external PCI Express devices.
- Synaptics touchpad improvements for newer laptops, primarily Lenovo devices.
- Device Tree additions for the Purism Librem 5 and other ARM boards.
- Support for the Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard by leveraging the hid-apple driver so that all functionality now works.
- A rewrite to the Intel Haswell audio driver for the Lynx Point / Wildcat Point audio DSP hardware.
- Audio output support for the Intel DG1.
- Creative SoundBlaster AE-7 support at long last was tackled by the community.
- Nintendo Switch controller support was upstreamed.
Other:
- Support for Amazon Nitro Enclaves and other char/misc churn.
- Many networking subsystem updates.
- Initial landing of the long overdue revamp to printk().
- The introduction of the Vidtv virtual driver for the media subsystem.
- A new static_call() function to help cases where Retpolines are used.
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