Linux Kernel 5.3 Released With Support For AMD Navi GPUs, Intel Speed Select

Linus Torvalds releases Linux Kernel 5.3, Here’s what’s new

Linus Torvalds yesterday officially announced the release of Linux 5.3. This version brings many new features and improved support for AMD Navi GPU, networking, security, drivers and much more.

“So we’ve had a fairly quiet last week, but I think it was good that we ended up having that extra week and the final rc8.

“Even if the reason for that extra week was my travel schedule rather than any pending issues, we ended up having a few good fixes come in, including some for some bad btrfs behavior. Yeah, there’s some unnecessary noise in there too (like the spelling fixes), but we also had several last-minute reverts for things that caused issues, said Linus Torvalds in the announcement.

“One _particularly_ last-minute revert is the top-most commit (ignoring the version change itself) done just before the release, and while it’s very annoying, it’s perhaps also instructive.

The Linux 5.3 kernel brings better support for AMD Radeon Navi graphics cards, such as the AMD Radeon RX5700, Intel Icelake Gen 11 graphics, initial Intel HDR display support, and support for Zhaoxin x86 processors.

Linux 5.3 supports the 0.0.0.0/8 IPv4 range allowing for 16 million new IPv4 addresses. It is also compatible with Intel Speed Select used in Intel Xeon CPUs.

Further, a new pdifd_open(2) system call has been added in the mainline release to help service managers to solve PID reuse issues efficiently. It also brings support for the utilization clamping mechanism in power-asymmetric CPUs, improved support for the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, and support for the lightweight and flexible ACRN embedded hypervisor.

The update also brings improved support for tablets, touch screens, keyboards, and mouses, along with Apple MacBook and MacBook pro keyboard support for Linux desktop users. Besides this, file systems have improved for NFS, CIFS, AFS, CODA, OCFS2, Ceph, ext4, Btrfs, and XFS. It has also added new support for TCG2 event logs on EFI systems.

With this release, the Linux 5.4 kernel merge window is now open for release as stable in November.