Linux, the free and open source operating system, has one of the largest communities. Hundreds of users, controlled by Linus Torvalds , participate in the development, improvement and maintenance of this operating system. Every few months a new version of Linux comes to users. These updates are typically small, and focus on bringing support for new hardware and enhancing some internal features, such as file systems. However, the new Kernel Linux 5.8 is different, and it is that this is one of the biggest updates seen in the history of the Kernel, with changes in 20% of its components.
Main features of Kernel Linux 5.8
This new version of the Kernel has brought, as usual, new drivers and support for all kinds of hardware. For example, in terms of graphics, we can highlight the renewed support for Qualcomm Adreno 405/640/650 chips and for Intel Tiger Lake SAGV. In addition, support for everything related to Radeon graphics has also been improved, adding compatibility with AMDGPU TMZ, support for Radeon Navi / GFX10 recovery, improvements in thermal sensors of generic Radeon drivers, support for P2P buffer / DMA in supported graphics and new modifiers in NVIDIA Nouveau drivers.
Various improvements have also been made around CPUs. For example, the AMD Energy Driver has now been introduced for Zen and Zen2, support for reading the temperature on AMD Ryzen 4000 Renoir, multiple improvements and support for KVM virtualization systems, new patches for Specter, improvements in support for CPPC CPUFreq, support for new ARM processors, Ice Lake Xeon, POWER10, and RISC-V, as well as support for AMD Zen / Zen2 RAPL, Intel TPAUSE, XSAVES supervisor, and security enhancements in ARM64.
File systems have also been improved. EXT4, BTRFS and exFAT have received a lot of improvements and optimizations. F2FS now supports LZO-RLE compression, optimization enhancements in Xen 9pfs, and DAX implementation enhancements. Compatibility with SMB3, a system that emulates MLC-NANDs as SLC, and support for ERASE / Discard / TRIM in MMCs has also been improved.
The operation of other hardware within Linux has also been added and / or improved:
- Acceleration systems by IA Habana Labs Gaudi.
- Intel Tiger Lake Thunderbolt.
- Peer-to-peer DMA for AMD Raven and Renoir.
- Audio support in AMD Renoir ACP.
- Intel Atom (AtomISP).
- Changing the FN and Ctrl keys on Apple keyboards.
- AMD SPI drivers.
And, of course, other important and relevant changes within the Linux ecosystem. Among others, improvements to optimization and management of consumption and Linux boot, reinforcement of SELinux security, improvements to the Jitter RNG, updates to Staging and IIO, new optimization programmers, new notification queues and modernization of many elements internal, especially Intel ME and cache access.
Many minor changes, few major developments
The list of news may seem, at first glance, not much larger than that of any other version. However, in addition to all of the above, minor changes have been made (small fixes, bug fixes, security enhancements, etc.) to 20% of the components throughout the Kernel . Without a doubt, it is one of the few times that so much code has been touched in a single update, very reminiscent of the last version 4.9.
This does not necessarily imply that this is going to be a revolutionary version. Not much less. It is simply one more version of the Kernel, but with a lot of maintenance work to avoid problems in the future. But nothing else.
Currently, the community has already started working on what will be the next version of the Kernel, 5.9 , of which too many details are not yet known.
Install Kernel Linux 5.8
The source code of this new version of Linux is already available on the main Kernel website . All users who want to can download and compile it manually in their distribution. Specific software can also be used to download and install new versions of the Kernel, such as ukuu.
Rolling Release users will soon receive a new update with this new version of Linux in order to start taking advantage of its advantages. However, distros that are not Rolling Release, such as Ubuntu, will not officially receive this new Kernel, but will have to wait for the new versions of Ubuntu (and other distros) to be able to have the latest version of Linux on their distros .