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The Linux 5.4 kernel series was marked today as “longterm” on the kernel.org website and it’s now an official LTS (Long-Term Support) release, which will receive maintenance updates for the next two years.
Released on November 24th, 2019, Linux kernel 5.4 is a great release that introduces a kernel lockdown feature, initial support for Microsoft’s exFAT file system, a new lightweight, read-only file system called EROFS, support for new AMD GPUs and APUs, such as Navi 12 and 14 GPUs, Arcturus GPUs, and Renoir APUs. It also adds initial support for Intel Tiger Lake GPUs.
Other noteworthy features of the Linux 5.4 kernel series include the virtio-fs driver for sharing file systems between the host and virtual machines, support for Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoCs, namespacing support for kernel symbols, dm-clone for live cloning of block devices, fs-verity for detecting file modifications, and improved app memory management on Android.
Linux kernel 5.4 LTS will be supported until December 2025
With the release of the Linux 5.4.18 maintenance update on February 5th, 2020, the Linux 5.4 kernel’s status was changed from “stable” to “longterm” on the kernel.org website. This means that it is now an official LTS kernel and will receive updates and important bug fixes for the next five years.
This is the first Linux 5.x kernel to become LTS (Long-Term Support). Until now, the most advanced and recommended Linux LTS kernel was 4.19 for most GNU/Linux distributions.
Renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman revealed in August 2019 that the next LTS kernel would be the “last released” kernel of the year. But only now it’s marked as LTS because Linux kernel 5.5 was still in development.
Linux 5.4 LTS will be supported until December 2025.
Update 26/08/20: The LTS status of the Linux 5.4 kernel series was changed with an extra three years of support. Therefore, it will now be supported until December 2025 instead of December 2022. I’ve updated the article accordingly.
Last updated 4 years ago
