Linux 5.19 Features: AMD SEV-SNP + Zen 4 Prep, Intel TDX + IFS, LoongArch, Big TCP, Apple M1 NVMe

Other Hardware:

- Never-ending work on the Synopsys DWC3 USB3 driver.

- The Apple eFuses driver was merged for reading these eFuses programmed on Apple M1 SoCs for storing calibration data.

- Continued work on the Intel Habana Labs AI driver.

- Support for initiating firmware updates via sysfs for use by Intel FPGA PCIe cards and other possible use-cases.

- Support for reporting a connected device's physical location where exposed such as via ACPI. This can help note where a connected component is in relation to the server/system in cases of multiple ports/locations, etc.

- The Raspberry Pi Sense HAT joystick driver was merged.

- Chrome OS EC driver support for the Framework Laptop.

- Continued enablement of Compute Express Link (CXL) support for next-gen servers.

- Better support for the Lenovo ThinkPad Trackpoint II keyboard.

- Proper handling of Keychron C-Series/K-Series keyboards.

- Wacom driver improvements and other HID work.

- Intel's AVS audio driver began landing as a rewrite to the old Skylake / Kabylake / Apollo Lake / Amber Lake era audio driver code.

- Continued hardware monitoring improvements from ASUS motherboard additions to Aquacomputer devices.

Security:

- Clang RandStruct support for randomizing the structure layout and similar to the existing GCC support.

- Continued modernization work to the RNG code for random number generation.

- Intel SGX enclaves were prone to crashing under heavy memory pressure but that issue for Software Guard Extensions on Linux is now resolved.

- Making life miserable for app developers who have bad behaving split-lock usage.

Other Kernel Activity:

- Many significant networking improvements from Big TCP to pureLiFi LED lighting for wireless communication to many other improvements.

- A new option for easily configuring an x86_64 debug kernel.

- Printk will now offload messages to per-console KThreads.

- Many memory management improvements.

- A new subsystem merged is the Hardware Timestamping Engine (HTE) for coordinating between time providers and consumers like GPIOs and IRQs. The initial HTE provider with Linux 5.19 is just for the NVIDIA Tegra Xavier SoC. Though Linus Torvalds isn't fond of the HTE name and could potentially be changed still this cycle or next.

- Spring cleaning to the staging area, including promoting the WFX WiFi driver out of staging.

- Zstd compressed firmware support as an alternative to the existing XZ-compressed firmware support for saving disk space by compressing the many binary firmware files present on modern Linux systems.

Now on to some Linux 5.19 kernel benchmarking...