Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.17-rc3, the latest test kernel for Linux 5.17, which is expected to be available as a stable release by the end of March.
Regarding this week’s changes, Torvalds summarized in the release announcement:
Diffstat shows that we probably have more filesystem activity than usual, and filesystem activity is all-encompassing, from re-introduction of fscache support for rewritten CIFS, to vfs-level error handling fixes, to general filesystem-specific fixes ( btrfs, ext4, xfs), to some Unicode Kconfig cleanup. So, it’s not a single change, we have more filesystem stuff going on changing.
Driver fixes (network, GPU, sound, pin control, platform drivers, SCSI, etc.) still dominate. On the driver side, some recovery measures to re-enable hw accelerated scrolling for legacy fbdev devices may be prominent in this update.
Beyond that, there’s some random stuff: regular arch updates (prominent among KVM), general networking and core kernels, and tool upgrades (selftests and perf). There are also some documentation fixes.
FBDEV/FBCON hardware-accelerated scrolling support is a restoration of previously disabled code. Since disabling it takes a performance hit on graphics cards that were previously able to provide 2D hardware acceleration, the kernel is trying to restore it.
The code that originally called for disabling acceleration had claimed that Nouveau, OMAPDRM, and GMA500 were the only beneficiaries, which turned out to be inaccurate. There are nearly three dozen FBDEV drivers using it… The kernel team’s reply acknowledged some bugs in the code that accelerated scrolling. The Linux frame buffer console will give up on accelerated scrolling because it’s full of bugs. Linux 5.17-rc3 has a lot of filesystem changes, and “some mixed random stuff”.