Linux 5.7 Released - Main Changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V Architectures

OK… I’m a bit late on that one. Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.7 last week:

So we had a fairly calm last week, with nothing really screaming “let’s delay one more rc”. Knock wood – let’s hope we don’t have anything silly lurking this time, like the last-minute wifi regression we had in 5.6..

But embarrassing regressions last time notwithstanding, it all looks fine. And most of the discussion I’ve seen the last week or two has been about upcoming features, so the merge window is now open and I’ll start processing pull requests tomorrow as usual. But in the meantime, please give this a whirl.

We’ve got a lot of changes in 5.7 as usual (all the stats look normal – but “normal” for us obviously pretty big and means “almost 14 thousand non-merge commits all over, from close to two thousand developers”), So the appended shortlog is only the small stuff that came in this last week since rc7.

Go test,

Linux 5.6 brought us some very interesting features including USB 4 support, in-kernel Wireguard VPN, and 2038-year readiness.

I’m so late… Linux 5.7.1 has already been released as well, but let’s still have a look at some of the most notable changes from Linux 5.7:

New, higher-quality exFAT file system from Samsung replacing the exFAT implementation added to Linux 5.4.
Thermal Pressure in the task scheduler – Thermal Pressure makes the task scheduler more aware of frequency capping, and leads to better task placement among available CPUs in event of overheating, which should lead to better performance numbers. See more details on LWN.
Tiger Lake enablement – Graphics, thermal & power management, Ethernet
Coding-style – Deprecate 80-column warning

List of Linux 5.7 Changes for the Arm Architecture

ARM64 – ARM Kernel Pointer Authentication support – After the addition of the ARMv8.3 Pointer Authentication extension in Linux 5.0 for userspace code, Linux 5.7 adds it to the arm64 kernel. It helps to protect the kernel against attacks using return-oriented programming.
Allwinner
- Allwinner A20 – LVDS
- Allwinner A83T and A64 – Rotate driver
- Allwinner H6 – SPI
- Allwinner R40 – Thermal
- New Devices – PocketBook Touch Lux 3 (A13) ebook reader, Pine64 PineTab & PinePhone, Linutronix Testbox v2 (A20) for for the Lamobo R1 router
Rockchip
- SPI driver for Rockchip PX30, RK3308 and RK3328
- New boards – Pinebook Pro laptop (RK3399)
Amlogic
- Clock – Update Amlogic meson8 and gxbb audio clock, update Amlogic G12A spicc clock sources
- Driver for the Amlogic secure power domain controller
- PCIe controller – Add Amlogic AXG PCIe PHY, AXG MIPI/PCIe analog PHY drivers
- USB – Add support for USB2 PHY in Amlogic A1 SoC Family to phy-meson-g12a-usb2 driver
- Media – Add VP9 decoding for the Amlogic GXL, G12A & SM1 SoCs, using
  the common “HEVC” HW decoder
- DTS Updates
  - Sound, Bluetooth, thermal updates
  - A1: add secure power domain nodes
  - G12[ab]: add SPI support, enable on odroid-n2
  - misc. cleanups
- New boards – N/A
Samsung
- Defconfig changes
  1. Enable Energy Model and Multi-core scheduler because they fit common use of Exynos SoCs – mobile devices,
  2. Enable more drivers for GalaxyS3/Trats2.
- DTS Updates
  1. Various fixes:
    - Reboot of some Odroid Exynos4412-based boards,
    - MMC regulators on Arndale5250,
    - Memory mapping on Artik5,
    - GPU power domain on Exynos542x boards,
    - LCD SPI polarity on UniversalC210,
  2. Add thermal cooling of GPU on Odroid XU3/XU4 family,
  3. Add dynamic-power-coefficient to Exynos5422 for energy model.
- New Boards – N/A
Qualcomm
- Addition of Snapdragon 865 (SM8250) high-end phone processor and IPQ6018 WiFi-6 router chip.
- New Clock drivers – Qualcomm SM8250 RPMh and MSM8976 RPM clks, Qualcomm SM8250 Global Clock Controller (GCC), Qualcomm SC7180 Modem Clock Controller (MSS CC)
- Driver updates for Linux 5.7:
  - New library for subscribing to notifications about protection domains being stated and stopped and the integration of this
    with the APR driver.
  - Fixes and cleanups for AOSS driver, socinfo and rpmh.
- DTS updates:
  - Bluetooth support on Nexus 5
  - USB on Xperia Z1
  - Define gpio-ranges throughout the various gpio-controllers.
- DTS ARM64 updates:
  - SDM845 – Audio, PCIe and IP-accelerator support, and the interconnect providers are refactored. The Lenovo Yoga C630 has audio enabled and the DB845c has PCIe, analog audio and low-speed interfaces enabled. The SDM845 MTP has its display enabled and firmware location updated to match linux-firmware.
  - SC7180 – CPU topology and power properties. Interconnect providers,
    eMMC, SD-card, multimedia clocks, display, Bluetooth, Venus are added. Critical trip points are added as well as various fixes.
  - MSM8916 – FastRPC support added, ETM power management and reserved, memory for Samsung A2015 are corrected.
  - MSM8996 – Switch to generic QMP PHY driver for UFS support.
  - MSM8998 – Temporarily disables part of Coresight to boot without
    clk_ignore_unused. CEQ for eMMC on QCS404 is enabled.
  - Fixes throughout the platforms to fix binding compliance, correct
    compatibles for SDHCI nodes and add gpio-ranges.
- Defconfig updates – Enable QRTR and the Broadcom bluetooth driver in the qcom_defconfig for usage on the 8974 devices.
- ARM64 defconfig updates
  - Enable SDM845 audio, display and gpu related configs and the Truly NT35597 panel driver, all relevant for various SDM845 based boards.
  - Enable IPQ6018 clocks and pinctrl and the pmic vibrator driver for PM8916.
- New Boards – SM8250 and IPQ6018 evaluation boards
MediaTek
- Addition of Mediatek MT8516 application processor SoC for voice assistants
- RTC driver for MediaTek MT2712 SoC
- New Board – “Pumpkin” development board
Other new Arm hardware platforms and SoCs:
- NXP – NXP i.MX8M Plus SoC and evaluation board; Kontron “sl28” board family based on NXP LS1028A; Eleven variations of the new i.MX6 TechNexion Pico board, combining the “dwarf”, “hobbit”, “nymph” and “pi” baseboards with i.MX6/i.MX7 SoM carriers; 3x additional Toradex Colibri SoM based on i.MX7.
- ST Ericsson – Samsung S7710 Galaxy Xcover 2 Android phone based
  on the ST Ericsson u8500 platform (2013)
- STMicro – DH Electronics DHCOM SoM and PDK2 rev. 400 carrier based on
  STMicroelectronics STM32MP157
- Renesas – M3ULCB starter kit for R-Car M3-W+; Hoperun HiHope development board with Renesas RZ/G2M

MIPS Linux 5.7 Changelog

There are only a few changes to MIPS tihis time around as the situation has changed with MIPS…

loongson64 irq rework
dmi support loongson
replace setup_irq() by request_irq()
jazz cleanups
minor cleanups and fixes

Summary of changes for RISC-V architecture

Activity appeared limited on RISC-V side too:

Partial support for the Kendryte K210.
SBI v0.2 support.
Fixes to support for building with LLVM-based toolchains. The
resulting images are known not to boot yet.
Various smaller fixes and cleanups

If you’d like even more details I’ve generated the full changelog (commit messages only) using the command git log v5.6..v5.7 --stat. Alternatively, you could check out Linux 5.7 changelog on KernelNewbies website.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.