KERNEL WATCH
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, because someone has to…
Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.17, saying “we had an extra week at the end of this release cycle, and I’m happy to report that it was very calm indeed.” The latest kernel includes many new features, such as support for “Compile Once, Run Everywhere” or “CO-RE” BPF programs that enable developers to ship BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter, a kind of JITable small program that’s loaded directly into the kernel on behalf of a user) portably without recompiling for each target machine’s kernel.
Another new feature is support for a new AMD P-State driver, replacing the legacy ACPI P-State driver with an ACPI CPPC-enabled one instead. The upshot of this is that those with recent Zen CPUs should see improved power and performance management, with the kernel able to more precisely communicate to the platform the desired level of responsiveness to particular workloads. In turn, the underlying Zen platform is more able to communicate its own available capabilities to the operating system, similarly to the intel_pstate driver.