After the release of Linux 5.2 in July, Linus Torvalds announced Linux 5.3 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List in the middle of September. With the release of Linux Kernel 5.3, a wealth of improvements arrived as usual as it was with every update to the Linux kernel.
Optimizations and new hardware support
With this update, Linux users will see optimizations, new hardware support, and graphics compatibility. The new version of Linux Kernel has support for Intel Speed Select used in Intel Xeon server processors and has support for AMD Navi GPUs. Linux now supports the 0.0.0.0/8 IPv4 range, which means allowing for 16 million new IPv4 addresses.
Besides these, Linux users will see important file systems improvements for NFS, CIFS, AFS, CODA, OCFS2, Ceph, ext4, Btrfs, and XFS. This kernel release also provides support for another x86 processor line from Zhaoxin, a joint venture between the Chinese government and VIA Technologies.
High performance-oriented hypervisor
One of the important updates to the kernel is the addition of a small-footprint hypervisor ACRN which runs with a small overhead and highly performance-oriented. ACRN provides support for many host operating systems and runs with minimal latency (said to be real-time). This hypervisor is also very well suited for embedded environments with hardware constraints.
Linus Torvalds also gave a heaps-up in his announcement that they start working for Linux 5.4 release from now on, saying:
And this obviously means that the merge window for 5.4 is open, and I’ll start doing pull requests for that tomorrow. I already have a number of them in my inbox, and I appreciate all the people who got that over and done with early.
What’s new in Linux kernel 5.3?
- Initial support for AMD Navi GPUs
- Support for Zhaoxin x86 CPUs
- 16 million new IPv4 addresses
- Intel Speed Select support for Xeon
- Lightweight hypervisor ACRN
- Utilization clamping support in task scheduler
- MacBook & MacBook Pro keyboard support for Linux desktop users