Linux 5.0 is now the most advanced kernel series

Mar 7, 2019 13:33 GMT  ·  By

With the Linux 5.0 kernel series out the door, it's time to take a look a Collabora's contributions to this major milestone, which will soon be ready for mass adoption.

Linux kernel 5.0 brings several goodies to the table, including FreeSync support in the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver for stutter-free viewing experience on AMD Radeon GPUs, support for swap files in the Btrfs file system, a new energy-aware scheduling feature for ARM big.LITTLE CPUs, and support for the Adiantum file system encryption in fscrypt for low power devices.

Linux kernel 5.0 also introduces support for the binderfs file system to allow running of multiple Android instances, support for the Generic Receive Offload (GRO) feature in the UDP implementation, and much more. Collabora's developers managed to contribute a total of 45 patches during the development cycle of Linux kernel 5.0, as well as to sign-off-by tag 47 patches and reviewed-by tag 9 patches.

Here are Collabora's contributions to Linux kernel 5.0

In the graphics area, Collabora's contributions to Linux kernel 5.0 include a render node for the VGEM DRM driver that meets the initial intent of the graphics driver of being a virtual render node instead of it being used as a primary/master node for the rendering capability, and Explicit Synchronization of dma-bufs for the virtio_gpu virtual display/GPU driver used by QEMU.

In the media area, Collabora has enabled hardware accelerated JPEG encoding on the rk3288 and rk3399 Rockchip SoCs and improved the VIMC (Virtual Media Controller Driver) driver. For the Chrome OS platform, Collabora made a change in the Chrome development model towards an upstream-first policy. They also added support for custom sysfs attributes and cleaned up existing drivers. More details about all the contributions made by Collabora are available in their latest blog post.