Linux 5.15 Delivers Many Features With New NTFS Driver, In-Kernel SMB3 Server, New Hardware

Other Hardware:

- Various Habana Labs AI accelerator driver updates.

- Working Ethernet for OpenRISC when using LiteX FPGA configurations.

- ASUS ACPI platform profile support.

- ASUS WMI handling enhancements around eGPU handling, dGPU disabling, and panel overdrive abilities.

- High resolution scrolling for the Apple Magic Mouse.

- The Apple M1 IOMMU driver was merged as an important step forward for bringing up more Apple M1 SoC components under Linux.

- NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX support and other new ARM platforms/boards were added.

- AMD Van Gogh APU audio driver was added for the new AMD ACP5x audio co-processor.

- A new Realtek RTL8188EU WiFi driver to replace its existing staging driver code.

- Support for next-generation Intel "Bz" WiFi hardware support.

- Another water cooling pump sensor driver.

- Intel also added wired networking support for its Lunar Lake platform to the e1000e driver.

- Support for reading from the Nintendo OTP memory area.

- Arm SMCCC TRNG driver was added.

- Cirrus Logic Dolphin audio support.

General Kernel Activity:

- The PREEMPT_RT locking code was merged as a big step forward towards getting the real-time (RT) patches upstreamed in the Linux kernel.

- Amazon's DAMON landed for a data access monitoring framework that can be used for proactive memory recalamation and other features.

- Adapting the SLUB code to be RT-compatible.

- The introduction of VDUSE for vDPA devices in user-space.

- A short-lived change by Linus Torvalds himself was enabling -Werror by default for all kernel builds but after just days that was changed to only enabling -Werror for compile test builds.

- Better handling during memory reclamation for servers with multiple memory tiers.

- The new process_mrelease system call to more quickly free the memory of a dying process.

- Fixing a scalability issue that led to very long boot times on huge IBM servers taking as much as 30+ minutes to boot.

- Various scheduler improvements.

- Various power management improvements.

- BPF timers support and MCTP protocol support are among the network changes.

Security:

- Opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching as a security feature for the paranoid and other specialized conditions.

- Improvements around compile-time and run-time detection of buffer overflows.

- Additional protection around side channel attacks via clearing used registers prior to returning, making use of the compiler-side support.

- IMA-based measurements support for the Device Mapper code.

Stay tuned for our Linux 5.15 kernel benchmarks that are now firing up.