Linus Torvalds did not take a break during the Halloween holiday, but instead released Linux 5.15 as scheduled, and did not postpone the release of the stable version of the kernel for another week as previously rumored. Linux 5.15 has many outstanding changes, including the introduction of DAMON, the new NTFS file system driver from Paragon, the first support code for Xe HPG and DG2/Alchemist, temperature monitoring support for AMD Zen 3 APU, and more.
A short 5.15 version announcement issued by Linus Torvalds was published on the kernel mailing list:
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You can refer to the Linux 5.15 feature list here to get a more comprehensive understanding of the exciting changes in this cycle:
Processor
- The AMD PDTDMA driver was merged after two years of development to benefit AMD EPYC server processors.
- Expanded stack randomization for RISC-V, and connected other functions for RISC-V.
- Support Alder Lake in TCC driver.
- An important AMD laptop pause/resume repair, benefiting various models.
- KVM now defaults to the new x86 TDP MMU and adds AMD SVM 5-level paging.
- AMD Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring support is finally completed.
- Yellow Carp APU temperature monitoring support.
- Incorporated AMD SB-RMI driver to facilitate server usage, such as the Linux-based OpenBMC software stack.
- Optimized the C3 entry processing of AMD CPU.
- Some IRQ kernel code improvements have benefited the hardware of the Intel 486 era.
- An AVX2 optimized SM4 password implementation.
Graphics
- Many new RDNA2 PCI IDs point to a possible RDNA2 graphics card update.
- AMD Cyan Skillfish graphics support.
- Initial support for Intel XeHP and DG2/Alchemist independent graphics.
- Remove Intel Gen10 / Cannon Lake graphics support.
- There are many other graphics improvements in the DRM/KMS driver.
Storage/file System.
- Incorporated a new NTFS driver, which is a big improvement to the existing NTFS driver. This new driver is the “NTFS3” driver created by Paragon Software Corporation.
- Samsung’s KSMBD is incorporated within the core SMB3 file server.
- OverlayFS has better performance and replicates more attributes.
- FUSE now allows mounting an active device.
- Optimized the performance of F2FS.
- Share connections on multiple NICs via NFS client code.
- New optimization for EXT4.
- A lot of improvements to XFS.
- Degraded RAID mode support and performance improvements for Btrfs.
- Btrfs supports IDMAPPED mounting and Btrfs FS-VERITY support.
- Linux 5.15 I/O can reach ~3.5M IOPS per core.
- At the request of the system developers, support the serial number of the global county/disk event.
- Removed the LightNVM subsystem.
- Fixed the floppy disk driver code for Linux.
- Changes to other block subsystems.
The release of Linux Kernel 5.15 also means that the Linux kernel is now entering a very exciting merger window.