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Linus Torvalds announced the general availability of the final release of the Linux 5.7 kernel series, a major branch that brings numerous new features and improvements.
Seven weeks in development, the Linux 5.7 kernel is finally here. This series brings many goodies for Linux users, including a new and improved exFAT file system implementation, improved perf cgroup profiling, as well as a thermal-aware scheduler that should increase the performance.
Security-wise, Linux kernel 5.7 also introduces ARM Kernel Pointer Authentication for the ARM64 (AArch64) architecture to protect the kernel against return-oriented programming attacks and a new LSM (Linux Security Module) for BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) programs called bpf-lsm.
Also new is a frequency invariant scheduler accounting feature for certain x86 CPUs. This promises to improve the behavior of running tasks on the same processor when dealing with frequency scaling and dynamic voltage. Also, it’s now possible to detect split locks on x86 CPUs.
“We’ve got a lot of changes in 5.7 as usual (all the stats look normal – but “normal” for us obviously pretty big and means “almost 14 thousand non-merge commits all over, from close to two thousand developers”),” said Linus Torvalds.
Among other noteworthy changes, Linux kernel 5.7 brings write protection support for the userfaultfd(2) system call, support for creating processes in different cgroups than the parent one in clone(2), support for user xattrs in cgroupfs, power management improvements, and vDPA device support.
Of course, numerous of the supported file systems, architectures, drivers (networking, sound, serial, etc.), and other core components have been updated for improved the overall hardware support and performance.
Linux kernel 5.7 is available for download as source tarball for Linux OS integrators right now from the kernel.org website. However, it’s marked as a “mainline” kernel, so it is recommended to wait until the first point release, Linux kernel 5.7.1, hits the streets before upgrading.
Last updated 4 years ago
