As expected after a week in which everything returned to normal, Linus Torvalds has released a few hours ago Linux 5.7. It is the latest stable version of the kernel that it develops and has come with many new features, although not as prominent as those of a Linux 5.6 that until included a system that keeps our equipment cooler. In any case, we are facing an important launch if we consider that it improves on many fronts.
Unless they made some last minute changes, which could have resulted in reversing something on the following list, Linux 5.7 arrives with changes ranging from improved support for Intel and AMD to the new exFAT driver and other improvements in the file systems. Performance has also been improved in other sections. You have the list of most outstanding novelties below.
Linux 5.7 Highlights
The following list has been created by Michael Larabel and in it we see news such as:
- Processors:
- The Intel P-State driver now uses a default Schedutil slider when in passive mode (not HWP) thanks to frequency invariance support for schedutil.
- Preparations to support the RISC-V Kendryte K210 SoC.
- Support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865.
- Many new supported ARM devices including PineTab, PineBook Pro, and others.
- Intel SpeedSelect Technology Updates.
- Pointer authentication in the kernel on ARM64.
- Secure / protected guest VM support on IBM s390 and POWER architectures.
- Better CPU / platform support Loongson 3.
- A speculative execution fix for C-SKY CPUs.
- Thermal pressure monitoring for systems that are thermally overloaded for better location of tasks on hot-running CPU cores.
- Open-source graphics:
- Graphics are now considered stable enough to provide them out of the box.
- Great DRM TTM page support to initially improve the VMWGFX experience but eventually other drivers as well.
- Fixed some nasty bugs with Nouveau.
- Better Meson video decoding support.
- Intel iGPU Leak Security Mitigation for Legacy Gen7 / Gen7.5 Hardware.
- HDR / OLED panel support on AMDGPU.
- Fixes for new Renoir hardware.
- The VMware VMWGFX graphics driver stack has been preparing support for OpenGL 4.x.
- File systems and storage:
- IO_uring improvements for this Linux I / O interface.
- New exFAT file system driver that replaces the exFAT driver in the staging area that had been around for some releases. This new exFAT controller is in much better shape and is actively maintained by Samsung.
- Zstd compression for the F2FS file system.
- XFS is gearing up for online repair support and other underlying enhancements.
- Performance improvements for Ceph.
- OverlayFS support with VirtIO-FS on top.
- Preparation for the support of zoned devices in Btrfs.
- Industrial:
- Support for a remote swap file via SMB3 / CIFS.
- Qualcomm MHI bus support to enhance Qualcomm wireless support in the main Linux kernel along with Qualcomm IPA support.
- Support for Intel E823 Ethernet adapters that have not yet been released.
- Intel Tiger Lake support inside the E1000e controller.
- Other hardware:
- Apple USB fast charging support for iOS devices via new driver.
- Older Intel tablets see better touchscreen support.
- PCI Error Disconnect Recover capabilities.
- The mouse driver.
- New Sound Hardware Support from Realtek RT5682 to Amlogic GX to Realtek RL6231 and Lots of Sound Open Firmware Work.
- Infrastructure:
- EFI boot management improvements.
- Performance improvements for / dev / random.
- SELinux performance optimizations.
- Work has been done to make exec () less prone to deadlock.
- The ability to generate a process in a different cgroup from its relative.
- Additions of the Perf subsystem for AMD Zen 3 and Intel Tiger Lake.
- Kbuild enhancements that make it easy to build the kernel with an LLVM toolchain.
- The new call to the FSINFO system is quite fascinating.
- Split Lock Detection to help you notice (or kill) that big performance hit.
- Many updates to the scheduler from NUMA enhancements to other features.
- A small power button controller.
- Support for a unified user space access accelerator framework.
- General spring cleaning for staging.
Available now, soon in some distributions
Linux 5.7 It is now available, but we have two things to keep in mind: Until a first maintenance update is released, the developer team does not recommend it for mass adoption. On the other hand, we will have to install it on our own in most Linux distributions, while others, those that use the development model known as Rolling Release, will include it as an update in the coming days.