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Chapter 10. Hardware Enablement

Broadcom 5880 smart card readers with the updated firmware are now supported

This update includes the USB ID entries for the updated firmware version of the Broadcom 5880 smart card readers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now able to properly recognize and use these readers.
Note that users with the Broadcom 5880 smart card readers using older firmware versions should update the firmware. See the Support section at www.dell.com for more information about the updating process. (BZ#1435668)

fwupd now supports Synaptics MST hubs

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 adds a plug-in for Synaptics MST hubs to the fwupd utility. This plug-in enables you to flash firmware and query firmware information for this device. (BZ#1420913)

kernel-rt sources updated

The kernel-rt sources have been upgraded to be based on the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel source tree, which provides a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version. (BZ#1462329)

Improved RT throttling mechanism

The current real-time throttling mechanism prevents the starvation of non-real-time tasks by CPU intensive real-time tasks. When a real-time run queue is throttled, it allows non-real-time tasks to run or if there are none, the CPU goes idle. To safely maximize CPU usage by decreasing the CPU idle time, the RT_RUNTIME_GREED scheduler feature has been implemented. When enabled, this feature checks if non-real-time tasks are starving before throttling the real-time task. As a result, the RT_RUNTIME_GREED scheduler option guarantees some run time on all CPUs for the non-real-time tasks, while keeping the real-time tasks running as much as possible. (BZ#1401061)

VMware Paravirtual RDMA Driver

This enhancement update adds VMware Paravirtual RDMA Driver to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This feature allows VMware users to deploy and use Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based VMs with PVRDMA devices. (BZ#1454965)

opal-prd rebased to version 5.9

The opal-prd daemon, which handles hardware-specific recovery processes, has been rebased to version 5.9. This enhancement update includes the following important fixes and notable enhancements:
  • flush after logging to stdio in debug mode
  • fixes for memory leaks
  • fix for opal-prd command line options
  • fix for occ_reset call
  • API comment regarding nanosleep ranges
  • the pnor file is no longer passed while starting opal-prd
  • on FSP system host, pnor access interface is disabled
  • add support for runtime OCC load/start in ZZ
Users of opal-prd are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements. (BZ#1456536)

libreswan now supports NIC offloading

This update of the libreswan packages introduces support for the network interface controller (NIC) offloading. Libreswan now automatically detects the NIC hardware offload support, and the nic-offload=auto|yes|no option has been added for manual setup of this feature. (BZ#1463062)

Trusted Computing Group TPM 2.0 System API library and management utilities available

The following packages, which handle the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware and which were previously available as a Technology Preview, are now fully supported:
  • The tpm2-tss package adds the Intel implementation of the TPM 2.0 System API library. This library enables programs to interact with TPM 2.0 devices.
  • The tpm2-tools package adds a set of utilities for management and utilization of TPM 2.0 devices from user space. (BZ#1463097, BZ#1463100)

new packages: tpm2-abrmd

This update adds the tpm2-abrmd packages to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The tpm2-abrmd packages provide a system service that implemens the Trusted Plaform Module (TPM) 2.0 Access Broker (TAB) and Resource Manager (RM) specification from the Trusted Computing Group. (BZ#1492466)