KernelNewbies:

Linux 5.11 changelog.

1. Prominent features

1.1. Faster wine with Syscall User Dispatch

This release adds a mechanism to quickly disable/enable syscall handling for a specific process and redirect it to userspace via signals. This is useful for processes with parts that require syscall redirection and parts that don't, but who need to perform this boundary crossing really fast, without paying the cost of a system call to reconfigure syscall handling on each boundary transition. This is particularly important for Windows games running over Wine.

Recommended LWN article: Emulating Windows system calls, take 2

Documentation

1.2. Support for Intel SGX

Intel SGX is a new hardware functionality that can be used by applications to populate protected regions of user code and data called enclaves. Once activated, the new hardware protects enclave code and data from outside access and modification. SGX implementations have existed on desktop processors for several years. The upcoming 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Platform, code-named “Ice Lake” will also support SGX.

Recommended LWN article: SGX: when 20 patch versions aren't enough

Documentation

1.3. Faster memory leak debugging in ARM

The Linux kernel contains KASAN, a dynamic memory error detector that provides a fast and comprehensive solution for finding use-after-free and out-of-bounds bugs. A more performant and less memory hungry version, software tag-based KASAN, was added in Linux 5.0 for ARM 64 CPUs.

This release implements hardware tag-based KASAN for ARM 64. It relies on arm64 Memory Tagging Extension introduced in ARMv8.5 to perform memory and pointer tagging (instead of shadow memory and compiler instrumentation). While it doesn't removes all the overhead of KASAN, it is significantly faster and memory thrifty than the existing versions, which makes the discovery of memory errors easier.

Recommended LWN article: The Arm64 memory tagging extension in Linux

2. Core (various)

3. File systems

4. Memory management

5. Block layer

6. Tracing, perf and BPF

7. Networking

8. Architectures

8.1. ARM

8.2. X86

8.3. MIPS

8.4. S390

8.5. POWERPC

8.6. RISCV

8.7. ALPHA

8.8. OPENRISC

8.9. PARISC

9. Drivers

9.1. Graphics

9.2. Power Management

9.3. Storage

9.4. Drivers in the Staging area

9.5. Networking

9.6. Audio

9.7. Tablets, touch screens, keyboards, mouses

9.8. TV tuners, webcams, video capturers

9.9. Universal Serial Bus

9.10. Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)

9.11. Watchdog

9.12. Serial

9.13. CPU Frequency scaling

9.14. Device Voltage and Frequency Scaling

9.15. Voltage, current regulators, power capping, power supply

9.16. Real Time Clock (RTC)

9.17. Pin Controllers (pinctrl)

9.18. Multi Media Card (MMC)

9.19. Memory Technology Devices (MTD)

9.20. Industrial I/O (iio)

9.21. Multi Function Devices (MFD)

9.22. Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM)

9.23. Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C + I3C)

9.24. Hardware monitoring (hwmon)

9.25. General Purpose I/O (gpio)

9.26. Leds

9.27. DMA engines

9.28. Cryptography hardware acceleration

9.29. PCI

9.30. Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB)

9.31. FRU Support Interface (FSI)

9.32. Clock

9.33. PHY ("physical layer" framework)

9.34. EDAC (Error Detection And Correction)

9.35. Various

10. List of Pull Requests

List of Linus merges from v5.10 to v5.11-rc1

11. Other news sites

KernelNewbies: Linux_5.11 (last edited 2021-02-16 21:57:32 by diegocalleja)