Linux 5.13 Features From Apple M1 To New GPU Support, Security Additions
Storage + File-Systems:
- Continued work on Btrfs zoned mode support.
- Continued performance enhancements to IO_uring.
- UBIFS will now default to Zstd compression on supported kernel builds.
- SPI NOR one-time programmable memory support.
- An extreme performance improvement for OrangeFS, one of the cluster computing file-systems.
- Various other file-system improvements.
- Big pcluster support for EROFS.
Networking:
- The introduction of the WWAN subsystem.
- Reduced Retpoline overhead in VLAN and TEB GRO handling code.
- Realtek RTL8156 and RTL8153D support.
- The Microsoft Azure MANA network adapter code has been merged.
- BFP programs can now call kernel functions as another step forward for (e)BPF.
Other Hardware:
- Amazon Luna Game Controller support was added to the XPad driver.
- New Realtek audio hardware is supported.
- JPEG encoder/decoder support on the i.MX8 SoC.
- Apple Magic Mouse 2 support has been added to the Magic Mouse HID driver.
- Touchpad and keyboard support for newer Microsoft Surface devices.
- USB and Thunderbolt updates.
- Various power management updates.
- The Gigabyte motherboard WMI temperature driver allows newer motherboards to have working temperature readings on Linux.
- Continued adoption of ACPI platform profile support by Linux laptops.
Security:
- Landlock for unprivileged application sandboxing has been merged. The Landlock Linux security module (LSM) has been years in development and finally made it for Linux 5.13.
- Simplifying the Retpolines code.
- Clang CFI control-flow integrity support has been upstreamed as an important security feature with little run-time overhead.
- Randomizing the kernel stack offsets per system call as another means of beefing up kernel security.
Other:
- Continued work improving the printk code.
- A new misc cgroup controller.
- Zstd compressed modules handling.
- The VirtIO sound driver was merged.
- The usual random assortment of changes to char/misc.
Stay tuned for Linux 5.13 kernel benchmarks beginning to appear in the coming days. Linux 5.13 stable should be out around the end of June or otherwise early July if the cycle plays out ugly.
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