14 DAY TRIAL // With the release of the Linux 5.3 kernel series, it's time to take a look at the contributions made by Collabora's kernel development team during this cycle.
Officially announced by Linus Torvalds on September 15th, the Linux 5.3 kernel series introduces numerous new features and enhancements, among which we can mention support for AMD Radeon Navi GPUs, support for Zhaoxin x86 processors, support for the utilization clamping mechanism in power-asymmetric CPUs, as well as Intel Speed Select support.
It also adds support for the lightweight and flexible ACRN embedded hypervisor, support for 16 millions new IPv4 addresses in the 0.0.0.0/8 range, support for the umwait x86 instructions, a new pidfd_open(2) system call that enables handling of PID reuse issues in service managers, and numerous new and updated drivers for better hardware support.
Collabora's contributions to the Linux 5.3 kernel
As usual, Collabora showcases its contributions to the latest Linux kernel release in a blog post where they state that 77 commits have been authored by Collabora's kernel development team and merged in Linux kernel 5.3. The most important contributions being the addition of MPEG-2 decoding in the Hantro VPU driver.
"One might think that adding MPEG-2 decoding support is not in itself a particularly interesting feature (who uses MPEG2 these days?!), but, by doing that we introduced the common building blocks that will allow us to support other codecs like H.264 or VP8," explains Boris Brezillon.
They also added CODA 980 support on the CODA VPU driver, exposed performance counters on Mali Midgard GPUs, added the Panfrost driver to the default ARMv7 and ARM64 defconfigs, optimized EXT4 case-insensitive lookups, improved Motorola Droid 4 support, and improved support for various Chrome platforms.
Apart from the 77 authored commits merged in Linux 5.3 kernel, Collabora's kernel development team also contributed with 68 reviewed-by, 35 acked-by, 5 tested-by, and 50 non-authored signed-off-by patches. More details about Collabora's contributions to Linux kernel 5.3 are available here.