Few hours ago Linus Torvalds, creator, developer and leader of the Linux Kernel development project, has announced the official release of the new version which is Kernel 5.0 Well, after ten weeks of Linux Kernel 4.20, Linux Kernel 5.0 has been completed.
This release of Kernel 5.0 was expected from last week, but at Torvalds decision another week was added for testing, as I thought too many bug fixes had been used in the past week.
With more than 12,800 changes and various fixes, this new version of Linux Kernel 5.0 presents us with new important additions Among which we can highlight the support for GeForce RTX in Nouveau, the open source version of the Nvidia drivers, and the next generation AMD processors, as well as the Adiantum file system encryption system.
Kernel 5.0 with greater support for hardware and controllers
As mentioned this new release of Kernel 5.0 adds support for some drivers such as AMDGPU which add support for FreeSync It allows you to adjust the refresh rate of the information on the monitor screen to ensure minimal response time, smooth output, and no interruptions during games and video.
FreeSync also allows you to reduce power consumption by reducing the intensity of the refresh when the image on the screen does not change.
In addition, AMDGPU added the ability to reset the GPU, which includes support for CI, VI, and SOC15 GPUs.
In addition, Nouveau driver adds initial support for NVIDIA Turing TU104 and TU106 GPUs (GeForce RTX 2000), although it is limited to video mode control (power management and 2D / 3D graphics acceleration are not yet implemented).
Support for DSC technology has been implemented (Display Stream Compression), defined in the VESA DP 1.4 specification and provides tools for lossless data compression when exchanging information with displays that support very high resolution.
Intel DRM driver has improved compatibility with Icelake chips, as well as the tegra driver for the Tegra186 and Tegra194 chips with which also added support for audio forwarding via HDMI.
On the other hand, we can also highlight that this launch of the Kernel 5.0 arrives with driver support for Raspberry Pi touchscreens.
File systems
Kernel 5.0 adds the implementation of binderFS pseudo file system support for the Binder interprocess communication mechanism.
BinderFS allows multiple instances of the Android platform to run in the same environment by attaching different Binder IPC namespaces to different mount points.
As well as support for Adiantum file system encryption in fscrypt for low-power devices and support for swap files in the Btrfs file system that can be used in low-power devices that, due to excessive overload, cannot use the AES block encryption algorithm.
The changes to the Ext4 and XFS file systems have been limited to optimizations and fixes.
Increased support for ARM devices
The Linux Kernel 5.0 adds a new power-aware scheduling feature leading to better power management on devices using large ARM big.LITTLE CPUs.
And support for ARM platforms: Rockchip Gru Scarlet (Tablet RK3188), Phicomm N1 (Amlogic S905D), Libretech S805-AC, Linksys EA6500 v2 Wi-Fi Router (BCM4708), Facebook Backpack-CMM BMC, Renesas iWave G20D-Q7 (RZ / G1N), Allwinner t3 -cqa3t-BV3 (T3 / R40), Lichee Pi Nano (F1C100s), Allwinner Emlid Neutis N5, Mapleboard MP130, Marvell Macchiatobin Single Shot (Armada 8040), i.MX mtrion EMCON-MX6, imx6ul-pico-pi, imx7d- sdb-reva, i.MX7D PICO Hobbit, BQ Edison 2 QC, OrangePi Lite2, OrangePi 2G and OrangePi i96.
Download Kernel 5.0
This new version of Kernel 5.0 is available for download from its official website for those who like to compile it on their own.
While For those who want to wait, it is only a matter of days before the different Linux distributions begin to implement this new version and distribute the builds to your users.