Two weeks after the release of the Linux 5.8 kernel series, Linux Kernel 5.9 has been released by Linus Torvalds this week for public testing. This newest big release of Linux Kernel comes with hardware, graphics, and other performance updates.
What’s new in Linux Kernel 5.9?
In addition to the numerous AMD GPU updates, the changes consist of updated and new drivers and a mix of architecture updates, filesystems updates, core networking, and tooling work, documentation updates. Let’s have a look at the details:
- The FSGSBASE support is complete with this kernel version. That means you get a heavy performance boost for AMD and Intel systems
- Toshiba USB 3.0 adapter and MCT USB 3.0 adapter support added.
- Bunch of performance improvements for the IBM Thinkpad series.
- Radeon RX 6000 “RDNA ” graphics card and Intel Rocket Lake graphics card support.
- The upcoming USB 4 specification gets more support as work is underway for full support eventually in future kernel versions.
- More support for storage and file-system space. The Btrfs, F2FS seems performance improvements. More support is added for NVMe 2.0 spec for SSDs.
- IBM POWER10 processor sees initial work for support.
- Performance boost for ARM/ARM64 devices with optimized use of scheduler utilization information is added which is similar to Intel P-state push.
- Bug fixes on race conditions, memory leaks across modules.
- See full changelog
If you use the current Ubuntu Linux system whichever you are running – Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it is not recommended to install the mainline kernel packages of Linux 5.9.
Download Linux Kernel 5.9
Linux Kernel 5.9 available for download from the kernel.org website for testers and early adopters. It is expected that the final release of the Linux kernel 5.9 will be announced in early or mid-October 2020. Linux Kernel 5.10 will be the final kernel of this year 2020.
Also you may be interested in: How to update Linux Kernel without rebooting?
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