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The Arch Linux community released today a new Arch Linux ISO image, for October 2021, the first to be powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.14 kernel series.
That’s right Arch Linux fans, Arch Linux 2021.10.01 is up for grabs as I am writing this and it comes with Linux kernel 5.14 by default. The ISO image includes Linux 5.14.8 as default kernel since the recently released Linux 5.14.9 kernel is still in the Testing repos.
Linux kernel 5.14 is the latest kernel branch available for GNU/Linux distributions, bringing new features like a much-enhanced AMDGPU graphics driver for AMD GPU users, much-improved EXT4 and F2FS filesystems, the core scheduling functionality to better protect your computers against some of those Spectre vulnerabilities, as well as some goodies for ARM 64-bit (AArch64) and RISC-V users.
It also brings numerous new and updated drivers to provide us with top-notch hardware support. As such, if you weren’t able to use Arch Linux with Linux kernel 5.13, which now reached end of life, because some components in your computers were not detected correctly or at all, you should give Linux kernel 5.14 a try via the new ISO release.
Therefore, if you wanted to install Arch Linux with Linux 5.14, you can now download the Arch Linux 2021.10.01 ISO snapshot from the official website. The good news is that image also includes all the security patches and software updates released during the month of September 2021, so you won’t have to download hundreds of updates after the installation when using an older installation image.
Of course, existing Arch Linux users don’t have to download the new ISO image to keep their installations up to date. Linux kernel 5.14 landed in Arch Linux’s stable repositories a few weeks ago, so you’re probably already running it on your machine. If not, just run the sudo pacman -Syu command in a terminal emulator.
Last updated 2 years ago
