I think I have heard it from Antonio Lobato in F1 on occasion, when before the start of a race he says "be careful, because if you blink, you miss it." That has happened to us with the Linux 5.10 release, which we have blinked and missed the first interesting preview. And it is that, when it was not even 24 hours after the launch of the stable version, who is in charge of maintaining the Linux kernel already had launched Linux 5.10.1.
Typically, the first point or maintenance update takes several days to arrive, sometimes close to a week, but this time they had to do it before to include two fixes, both related to the storage code. The problems were serious enough to pass up, so we already have what they would otherwise announce as ready-made for mass adoption.
Linux 5.10 LTS arrives with many important news
Linux 5.10 is the new LTS version of Linux kernel, so it's an important release. But it has also introduced many new features, whose extensive list you can find in more detail in our sister blog and here you have some of its features. most outstanding news:
- Performance support for AMD Zen 3 along with other Linux performance additions.
- AMD Zen 3 EDAC support.
- Much faster mremap performance on ARM64 hardware.
- AMD Zen 3 temperature sensor support.
- Initial support for NVIDIA Orin.
- RISC-V initial boot via EFI.
- Support Raspberry Pi VC4.
- Updates to open source DRM
- Fsync performance optimizations for Btrfs.
- F2FS enhancements including age threshold garbage collector, support for faster file decompression, NVMe ZNS support, generic case folding, and more.
- A "volatile" option for OverlayFS to produce faster performance but where syncs are skipped.
- Nosymfollow mount option added and similar to BSDs to improve system security.
- EXT4 now supports fast commits and faster file overwrite performance in DIO / DAX modes.
Now available
Linux 5.10 is out now, though now the logical thing would be to install Linux 5.10.1 now. Right now, to install it you will have to do it manually, since Linux distributions take a while to update the packages. On systems like Ubuntu, it can be installed already using the tool Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installeras it picks up the software directly from the Linux Archive.