Linux 5.3 Is Near With Radeon RX 5700 Support, Speed Select & MBP Keyboard/Trackpad

The Linux 5.3 kernel is fit enough to be released today after another quiet week following 5.3-RC7. But due to the Linux Kernel Summit happening this week and Linus Torvalds traveling for that, he's expected to delay the stable kernel release until next weekend so as to not open the Linux 5.4 merge window until he returns from the event.

Given the many weeks since the Linux 5.3 merge window and the new features introduced to mainline, here is a reminder of all the features on tap for the upcoming Linux 5.3 stable release:

- AMD Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" support is a big enthusiast/gamer feature for Linux 5.3 with these new AMD GPUs now working off the latest kernel and of course also needing the newest user-space bits too.

- Intel HDR display support for Icelake and Geminilake or newer.

- Initial support for Intel Speed Select Technology under Linux for better power/performance controls on a per-core basis.

- Official support for the VIA-derived x86 Zhaoxin CPUs.

- Finally there's a mainline driver for keyboard and trackpad support of newer Apple MacBook Pro laptops. For 2015-era MacBooks and newer is now this finally-merged Apple SPI driver to enable these input devices to work on a clean kernel build.

- Native swap support for the F2FS file-system.

- Faster EXT4 performance when making use of the new case-insensitive functionality.

- ACRN guest hypervisor support.

- Support for compressed firmware files.

See our Linux 5.3 feature overview to learn about the other changes in tow with this forthcoming stable release.