NEW AND IMPROVED
I write this as 2021 comes to a close and we look to the year ahead. The past year has been eventful, both for society as a whole, as well as in the Linux community. We started the year just after the release of Linux 5.10, an LTS (Long Term Support) kernel for which updates will be available for years to come, and we end the year with the imminent release of 5.16.
Over the past year many new features have been merged into Linux, benefiting a range of systems. Embedded Linux gained support for the ACRN hypervisor targeting functional safety environments, as well as most of the rest of the guts of the “preempt-rt” Linux Real Time patches. On the phone front, Linux gained a new “process_ madvise” system call that can be used to manage memory pressure caused by apps. Laptop Linux users gained initial support for Apple M1 systems, nearly capable of running a (very) basic graphical desktop.
Server users gained core scheduling, a means to co-schedule workloads on the same hyper-threaded (SMT) CPU cores for improved security, and every Linux user benefitted from a range of new drivers, as well as many core kernel changes that aren’t exposed to users but do improve overall experience, maintability, and/or performance. An example of the latter was support for page folios to improve memory management scaling.
It’s obvious that going into 2022, we’ll see a continued focus on supply chain security, and on reducing memory safety bugs. Just exactly when this leads to the merging of support for drivers written in Rust is unclear yet.