Kernel Linux 5.8: news of one of the biggest updates

Key features of Kernel Linux 5.8

This new kernel version brought, as usual, new drivers and support for all kinds of hardware. For example, from the point of view graphics, it is possible to highlight the updated support for Qualcomm Adreno 405/640/650 chips and for Intel Tiger Lake SAGV. In addition, support for everything related to Radeon graphics has been improved, AMDGPU TMZ compatibility has been added, support for Radeon Navi / GFX10 recovery, improved thermal sensors for common Radeon drivers, P2P / DMA buffer support in supported graphics, and new modifiers. at NVIDIA Art Nouveau Drivers.

Various improvements have also been made around CPU. So, for example, AMD Now for Zen and Zen2 the Energy Driver has been added, support for reading temperatures on AMD Ryzen 4000 Renoir, several improvements and support for KVM virtualization systems, new patches for Specter, improvements in CPPC CPUFreq support, 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 many improvements and optimizations. F2FS now supports LZO-RLE compression, optimization improvements in Xen 9pfs, and improved DAX implementation. Compatibility with SMB3, a system that emulates MLC-NAND as SLC, and ERASE / Discard / TRIM support in MMC has also been improved.

Operation other equipment on Linux has also been added and / or improved:

• Accelerating systems IA Havana 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 keyboards Apple…
• AMD SPI drivers.

And of course other important and current changes in the Linux ecosystem. Among others, improvements to optimize and manage Linux consumption and boot, hardened SELinux security, enhancements for Jitter RNG, Staging and IIO updates, new optimizations programmers, new notification queues, and upgrades to many internals, especially Intel ME and cache access.

Many small changes, few major events

At first glance, the news list may not seem much longer than any other version. However, in addition to all of the above, minor changes have been made (minor fixes, bug fixes, security improvements, etc.) to 20% components throughout the core Without a doubt, this is one of the few cases where one update touched so much code that it looked a lot like the latest 4.9.

This does not necessarily mean that it will be a revolutionary version. Not much less. This is just another version of the kernel, but with a lot of maintenance work to avoid future problems. But nothing else.

Currently, the community has already started working on what will next kernel version, 5.9 of which too many details are not yet known.

Install Linux 5.8 kernel

The source code for this new version of Linux is already available on the main kernel site.Anyone can download and compile it manually in their distribution. Special software can also be used to download and install newer kernel versions such as ukuu.

Rolling Release users will soon receive a new update with this new version of Linux to start enjoying its benefits. However, non-Rolling Release distributions such as Ubuntu will not officially receive this new kernel, but will have to wait until newer versions of Ubuntu (and other distributions) can have the latest Linux in their distributions.