Each kernel cycle we have been seeing more RISC-V code get squared away and over the past year has begun running nicely on the likes of SiFive's HiFive Unleashed . With the Linux 5.9 merge window on the RISC-V side there are a number of new features now supported:
- Atomic read modify write is advertised for allowing OSQ locks to be enabled.
- Support for NO_HZ_FULL builds on RISC-V, which allows scheduling clock ticks to be avoided on CPUs that are idle or have only one runnable task. This can be important for HPC and real-time workloads.
- KCOV support for this code coverage tool.
- KMemleak support for detecting kernel memory leaks.
- Stack protector for buffer overflow protection.
- VM debugging for virtual memory.
- JUMP_LABEL support.
These changes plus other code improvements make for a nice RISC-V pull request for Linux 5.9.