And in the end there have been no surprises. After a confusing first few weeks, in the middle of development everything began to correct itself, in the past week everything was already normal and, a few hours ago, Linus Torvalds launched la stable version of Linux 5.13. The new version, like all the previous ones, adds support for all types of hardware, so it is likely that we can take advantage of some of its novelties to improve the user experience or simply be able to use something that until now we could not.
Below you have a list with the most outstanding news that have been included in Linux 5.13. As usual, from here we thank Michael Larabel for the great job he does following the development of the Linux kernel, and the list that you have below we have obtained from the medium Phoronix. The list is from May, but no reversal has been reported with any of the changes below.
Linux 5.13 Highlights
Processors
- Initial support for Apple's M1 SoC and Apple's 2020 hardware platforms is now available. However, the accelerated graphics and more refined support are still being worked on.
- Concurrent TLB support for some minor performance benefits.
- The AMD power controller has been removed, and there is no alternative at the moment.
- Added an Intel cooling driver to reduce the CPU clock to a lower temperature threshold than the default.
- Fixed AMD Zen support for Turbostat.
- Perf is preparing for Intel Alder Lake and new AMD Zen 3 events were added as well.
- Many improvements in RISC-V.
- Support for Loongson 2K1000.
- 32-bit PowerPC now supports eBPF and KFENCE.
- Microsoft prepares support for ARM 64-bit guest systems for Hyper-V.
- KVM brings improvements to AMD SEV and Intel SGX for guest VMs.
- AMD Crypto coprocessor support for Green Sardine APUs.
- Support for Intel bus lock detection has been added, in addition to existing support for split lock detection.
- KCPUID is a new utility on the tree to help bring in new x86 CPUs.
Graphics
- Intel Alder Lake S graphics support was preliminarily merged.
- Preparation for Intel discrete graphics support continues.
- Support for AMDGPU FreeSync HDMI has made for pre-HDMI 2.1 coverage.
- Initial support for AMD Aldebaran accelerator hardware.
- A generic USB display driver has been added for setups such as using a Raspberry Pi Zero as a display adapter.
- Intel DG1 platform monitoring technology / telemetry support.
- The POWER2.0 NVLink 9 driver has been removed due to lack of open source user support.
- Other Direct Rendering Manager driver updates.
Storage + File Systems
- Continuation of work on the support of Btrfs zoned mode.
- Continuation of performance improvements in IO_uring.
- New mount options for F2FS.
- UBIFS will now default to Zstd compression on supported kernel versions.
- Single-use SPI NOR programmable memory support.
- Device Mapper is seeing better performance for non-x86 persistent data and now makes more use of TRIM / DISCARD as well.
- Huge performance improvement for OrangeFS, one of the cluster computing file systems.
- Other file system improvements.
- Great pcluster support for EROFS.
Industrial
- Introduction of the WWAN subsystem.
- Reduced Retpoline overhead in VLAN handling code and TEB GRO.
- Realtek RTL8156 and RTL8153D support.
- Microsoft Azure MANA network adapter code has been merged.
- BFP programs can now call kernel functions as another step forward for (e) BPF.
Other hardware
- Support for the Amazon Luna Game Controller has been added to the XPad controller.
- New Realtek audio hardware is supported.
- JPEG encoder / decoder support on the i.MX8 SoC.
- Support for Apple Magic Mouse 2 has been added to the Magic Mouse HID driver.
- Touchpad and keyboard support for new Microsoft Surface devices.
- USB and Thunderbolt updates.
- Various power management updates.
- The Gigabyte motherboard WMI temperature controller allows newer motherboards to have temperature readings that work on Linux.
- Continued adoption of ACPI platform profile support by Linux notebooks.
Security
- Landlock has been merged for unprivileged application sandboxing.
- Simplification of the Retpolines code.
- Clang CFI's control flow integrity support has been incorporated as an important security feature with little runtime overhead.
- Randomization of kernel stack offsets per system call as another way to enforce kernel security.
Others
- Continuation of work to improve the printk code.
- A new misc cgroup controller.
- Management of Zstd compressed modules.
- The VirtIO sound driver was merged.
- The usual random assortment of changes to char / misc.
Linux 5.13 now available, but better wait for the first point update
The Linux 5.13 release it is official, but its installation is not recommended until at least the release of the first dot update. When the time comes, Ubuntu users who want to install it will have to do it on their own, while other distributions such as those based on Arch Linux will include it as an option in the coming days / weeks.