Eight Great Features Of Linux 5.8

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 31 July 2020 at 01:00 PM EDT. 23 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
If all goes well the Linux 5.8 kernel will be released as stable this weekend. Linus Torvalds last weekend expressed some uncertainty whether an extra release candidate would be required, but so far this week the kernel Git activity is light, thus for the moment at least is looking like 5.8 will be christened on Sunday.

In any case, Linux 5.8 stable should be out either this Sunday or the following weekend on 9 August. After the 5.8 merge window in June we wrote the Linux 5.8 feature overview, but if you forgot about those changes, here is a shorter list looking at eight of the most prominent new features of this kernel:

- AMDGPU Trusted Memory Zone "TMZ" support for encrypted video memory. User-space patches are also out for Mesa. AMD Radeon hardware also has now soft recovery support for Navi, better handling of critical thermal faults for Radeon GPUs, and other updates.

- The AMD Energy driver was introduced recently and now mainlined for Linux 5.8 to provide AMD Zen / Zen 2 energy sensor access on Linux. There is also other AMD energy/power work that's been happening recently as well like around the RAPL support while the PowerCap support didn't make it into this kernel. Also on the AMD front is Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" temperature support.

- A block device back-end for the Pstore code that allows saving oops/panic messages to disk for systems lacking other persistent memory stores already supported.

- The F2FS file-system now supports LZO-RLE transparent file-system compression, complementing Zstd and other compression algorithms already supported.

- Initial support for booting IBM POWER10 processors.

- Intel Tiger Lake Thunderbolt support.

- Improved power-savings for systems with PCIe to PCI/PCI-X bridges.

- Exciting to developers is the Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer for helping to spot race conditions within the kernel and already has been used for finding many legitimate bugs.

See the full feature list for more details. After Linux 5.8 is released, it's on to the Linux 5.9 merge window.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week