Linux 5.3 kernel releases

Linus Torvalds announced the official release of Linux 5.3 kernel on the Linux-kernel mailing list on the afternoon of September 15th. In the past two months, this version has experienced a total of 8 release candidate (RC) versions and was delayed by one week. This release brings many new features, hardware support improvements, and performance improvements.

Linux 5.3 kernel supports the Intel Speed Select so that the CPU performance adjustment easier in some devices. This release adds initial support for the AMD Navi GPUs in the amdgpu driver, these are the new AMD RX5700 GPUs that just recently became available. This release adds support for the core driver, displays (DCN2), GFX and compute (GFX10), System DMA (SDMA 5), Multimedia decode and encode (VCN2) and Power management.

The CPU introduces support for the Utilization Clamping mechanism, which helps mobile devices ensure that GUI threads take advantage of higher performance cores and turn background work to low-power, low-performance cores.

The 5.3 kernel also introduces a new pidfd_open(2) system call that is expected to help the service manager handle PID reuse issues, support umwait x86 instructions for more efficient userspace, and support lightweight and flexible ACRN embedded virtual Machine Manager, this feature is built for embedded IoT devices; and supports 16 million new IPv4 addresses in the 0.0.0.0/8 range.