GNU Linux-Libre 5.15 Kernel Is Here for Those Who Seek 100% Freedom for Their PCs

GNU Linux-Libre 5.15

Alexandre Oliva announced today the release and general availability of the GNU Linux-libre 5.15 kernel for those who seek 100% freedom for their GNU/Linux computers.

Based on the Linux 5.15 kernel series, the GNU Linux-libre 5.15 kernel is here to clean up a lot of drivers in an attempt to offer you a pure kernel free of proprietary code. Drivers that needed cleaning up include adreno, btusb, btintel, brcmfmac, and gehc-achc.

In addition, this release cleans up a new AArch64 qcom variant’s devicetree file, removes cleaning up scripts for the prism54 and rtl8188eu drivers, which were removed upstream in favor of new drivers that need cleaning up too, and it cleans up the mechanism behind the new option to enable -Werror during compilation.

” Very often, we clean up format strings used to construct firmware names, which renders the printf arguments unused. These are all expected for a tree cleaned up with the current machinery, so I’ve arranged for warnings about these issues to not be bumped to errors even if CONFIG_WERROR is enabled,” said Alexandre Oliva.

Other than the deblobbed drivers and files, the GNU Linux-libre 5.15 kernel includes the same new features and improvements as the upstream Linux 5.15 kernel, such as a new, fully functional NTFS file system implementation, realtime preemption locking, an in-kernel SMB3 server called ksmbd, new Btrfs and XFS features, and DAMON (Data Access MONitor).

Linux kernel 5.15 also brings direct I/O support on uncompressed files in the EROFS file system, the ability to migrate memory pages to persistent memory, support for the pre-allocated trace mechanism in the IOAM subsystem, support for the Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) protocol, and out-of-band data support for the Unix-domain sockets.

Without further ado, if you want to build a 100% free GNU/Linux computer that doesn’t include proprietary code, you can download and install the GNU Linux-libre 5.15 kernel right now from the official website. You can install it on virtually any free GNU/Linux distribution, but the devs provide ready-to-use binary packages for Debian-based and Red Hat-based distros too.

Image credits: GNU Linux-libre

Last updated 2 years ago

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