Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS Officially Released, This Is What’s New

Linux 5.10 LTS

Linus Torvalds officially released today the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, which brings numerous new features, improvements, as well as new and updated drivers for better hardware support.

After seven weeks of development, Linux 5.10 is finally here as the latest and greatest kernel series for GNU/Linux distributions wanting top-notch hardware support. Not only that, but it’s a long-term supported (LTS) branch, which means that it will probably receive support over the next 5 years.

Highlights of Linux kernel 5.10 LTS include support for the ARMv8.5 memory tagging extension, support for the SM2 digital-signature algorithm, support for the ISO 15765-2:2016 CAN transport protocol, support for the IGMPv3/MLDv2 multicast protocol, and support for Amazon Nitro enclaves.

The EXT4 file system now comes with a “fast commits” mode that dramatically reduces the latency of multiple file operations, the ZoneFS file system has a new mount option called explicit-open, and the OverlayFS file system can now ignore all forms of fsync() calls with its new “volatile” mode.

Linux 5.10 LTS also introduces the ability for the MIPS architecture to boot Zstd (ZStandard) compressed kernels, the ability to transmit data on multiple flows simultaneously, and support for the KVM hypervisor to defer to a user-space process for handling accesses to unknown MSRs (model-specific registers).

Moreover, the Btrfs file system received a performance boost for fsync() operations, and there’s a new SEV-ES feature that expands AMD’s SEV (Secure Encrypted Virtualization) to also encrypt the guest’s processor registers so that the host can’t access them with the exception when the guest explicitly shares them.

Among other noteworthy changes, the io_uring subsystem received support for creating restricted rings, the pidfd_open() system call gained support for creating non-blocking file descriptor, and more “year-2038” problems were addressed in the XFS file system.

The RISC-V architecture was improved as well and it’s now able to boot on EFI systems. Last but not least, Linux 5.10 LTS introduces several enhancements for BPF programs, such as the ability to sleep during execution and to access per-CPU variables.

Of course, there are numerous new and updated drivers that add support for new hardware components, and there’s also many under-the-hood improvements and bug fixes to make the Linux kernel more stable and reliable. A complete changelog is available here for more details.

You can download Linux kernel 5.10 LTS right now from kernel.org. However, being a long-term supported series, it will most likes arrive soon in the stable software repositories of many popular GNU/Linux distributions.

Last updated 3 years ago

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