Linux 5.17 Features From New AMD P-State To Xilinx Drivers, Lots Of New Hardware
Storage / File-Systems:
- A big rewrite to the FS-Cache and CacheFiles code for network file-systems.
- Performance improvements for F2FS.
- Mostly smaller improvements to XFS though there is quicker mount times possible.
- EXT4 has transitioned to using the new Linux mount API and the common get/set label ioctls.
- Performance improvements for Btrfs.
- Per-file DAX option for FUSE.
- Continued I/O optimization work.
Other Hardware:
- The hang fix if ejecting a broken floppy disk.
- Nintendo GameCube / Wii / Wii U real-time clock driver has finally made it to mainline.
- New Xilinx drivers have been added for their FPGA hardware.
- A generic USB GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) driver with initial support for a Sierra XM1210 receiver.
- The Apple PCIe driver adds clock gating support as the latest on the Apple M1 enablement push.
- Synopsys USB DWC3 multi-stream transfer (MST) support.
- Cirrus CS35L41 HD audio codec driver is new and supporting it on some newer Lenovo ThinkPads.
- NVIDIA Spectrum 4 network ASIC support.
- AMD Rembrandt network support for on the SoC.
- Many Intel WiFi driver improvements.
- Intel Alder Lake N audio support.
- Improved power management for the Intel Titan Ridge Thunderbolt controllers.
General / Other Kernel Enhancements:
- The serial console driver has a possible ~25% performance improvement.
- Xen pvUSB support has finally been mainlined after the patches floating around for over a decade.
- debug.config to more easily spin a kernel build with all the useful debug features enabled.
- Folio improvements, building off what was introduced in 5.16.
- A real-time analysis tool has been added to help in uncovering real-time kernel issues.
- Several notable Linux network performance optimizations.
Linux Security:
- Page Table Check support for helping to fight memory corruption issues.
- x86 Straight Line Speculation mitigation support is added in conjunction with supported compilers.
- Random Number Generator improvements including moving off SHA1 and performance optimizations.
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