Linux 5.3 for POWER, and ppc64le gets a Fedora Desktop

Linus always says that no Linux release is a feature release and numbers are purely bookkeeping instead of goalposts, but Linux 5.3 has landed. There are many changes for the x86 side of the fence that I won't mention here, but in platform-agnostic changes, 5.3 adds support for the AMD Navi GPU in amdgpu, allows loading of xz-compressed firmware files, further improves the situation with process ID reuse with additional expansions to pidfd (including polling support), refinements to the scheduler by supporting clamped processor clock ranges, and support for 0.0.0.0/8 as a valid IPv4 range, allowing another 16 million IPv4 addresses while IPv6 continues to not set the world on fire.

Power ISA-specific changes in this release are relatively few but still noteworthy. Besides support for LZMA and LZO-compressed uImages, there is now Power ISA support for HAVE_ARCH_HUGE_VMAP, which enables (as the name would suggest) huge virtual memory mappings. With additional code in a future kernel, this should facilitate upcoming performance improvements. There is also additional /proc support for getting statistics on how virtual CPUs are dispatched to physical cores by systems using the Power hypervisor.

Meanwhile, this won't make much difference to people like me who have been using Fedora for awhile, but if you want to experiment with other distros on your POWER9 system Fedora is working on Live and Workstation ISOs for ppc64le. Currently this is Rawhide only (which is what will become F32) and you can of course already install from Server and switch to the Workstation flavour, or install over the network. However, it's just another positive indicator that IBM's purchase of Red Hat will continue facilitating improvements in Linux in general and Fedora/RHEL support for OpenPOWER in particular, especially as the installed base of POWER9 workstations like our T2s and Blackbirds continues to grow in numbers. In fact, although we don't have statistics, it's still quite possible (counting box for box) that there are now more discrete POWER9 workstations in operation out there than there are servers.