Linus Torvalds announced that the first release candidate of 5.14 is available for testing. 5.14-rc1 brings new hardware supports. The ARM SOCs see the majority of the updates across different hardware. So, it comes with usual hardware changes and improvements over prior additions.
Hoping for a nice and calm release cycle
While talking about the actual difference of this release, he encouraged users to ignore – once again – another set of big AMD GPU hardware description header files.
He hoped for a nice and calm release cycle, saying,
“On the whole, I don’t think there are any huge surprises in here, and size-wise, this seems to be a pretty regular release too. Let’s hope that that translates to a nice and calm release cycle, but you never know. The last release was big, but it was all fairly calm despite that, so size isn’t always the determining factor here.”
Removing all legacy IDE code means deleting a few tens of thousands of lines of legacy code. It couldn’t stop the kernel from growing, but it’s still a cleanup.
New supports and usual updates
In addition to the Rust programming language support, Linux 5.14 RC1 has mainline support for the Raspberry Pi 400, Rockchip RK3568 SoC, and initial support for the Sony Xperia 1/1II and 5/5II.
In terms of graphic updates, this latest release includes more support for Intel Alder Lake P and Alder Lake M graphics cards, AMD Beige Goby GPU, and AMD Radeon graphics cards.
Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) now offers a read-only feature. EXT4 file system comes with the new code with an important update. This includes forcing all the transactions to the log, checkpointing the transactions, and flushing the log to disk.