5.8 was the Linux biggest release ever according to Linus Torvalds. Now, Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.10-rc1 that comes with a lot of interesting additions and improvements, two weeks after the release of the Linux 5.9.
The removal of an addressing tool
There were numerous AMD GPU updates, a mix of architecture updates, filesystems updates, core networking, and tooling work, documentation updates in Linux 5.9. 5.10-rc1 brings around 704k lines of new code and some 419k lines deleted.
Linus Torvalds explained the most interesting change of 5.10-rc1, saying,
“The most interesting – to me – change here is Christoph’s setf_fs() removal. It’s not a _huge_ change, but it’s interesting because the whole model of set_fs() to specify whether a userspace copy actually goes to user space or kernel space goes back to pretty much the original release of Linux, and while the name is entirely historic, the concept has remained. Until now.”
Changes and improvements in Linux 5.10
Here are the changes and improvements in Linux 5.10. Let’s see the details:
- Ingenic MIPS X2000/X2000E IoT processor support.
- PowerPC 601 support was retired as the original 32-bit PowerPC processor.
- SLDT / STR emulation with UMIP for helping some Windows games running on Linux under Wine no longer running into problems.
- A fix for AMD Zen 3 CPU frequency handling that stems from a workaround in 2012 for overriding the ACPI _PSD table on AMD processors.
- Perf support for AMD Zen 3 along with other Linux perf additions.
- AMD Zen 3 temperature sensor support.
- AMD Zen 3 EDAC support.
- Initial support for NVIDIA Orin.
- Much faster mremap performance on ARM64 hardware.
- Initial RISC-V booting via EFI.
- KVM picked up the new TDP MMU that can especially help with very large VMs.
- Xen fixes ARM guest support when operating with KPTI (Kernel Page Table Isolation) for mitigating Meltdown.
- AMD SEV-ES support for Secure Encrypted Virtualization “Encrypted State” (ES) for better securing virtual machines.
- AMD Secure Nested Paging IOMMU in preparation for SEV-SNP support.
- AMD SME hardware-enforced cache coherency.
- Zhaoxin 7-Series Centaur support.
- initial usage of the Intel SERIALIZE instruction.
- The Arm Memory Tagging Extension and Pointer Authentication are working to better protect the system with new ARM64 SoCs.
- A rewrite of ARM’s Spectre mitigations with the “Ghostbusters” rework.
- SMT balancing tweaks in the scheduler.
- Various other Intel/AMD processor changes.
Download Linux Kernel 5.10-rc1
Linux Kernel 5.10-rc1 is available for download on the kernel.org website for testers and early adopters. As usual, 5.10-rc1 will be followed by several weeks’ worth of problem-fixing patches. Linux Kernel 5.10 will be the final kernel of this year 2020.