Linux Kernel 5.9 Reaches End of Life, Upgrade to Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS Now

Linux 5.9 end of life

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today that the Linux 5.9 kernel series reached end of life, urging all users to move to the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series as soon as possible.

Launched just two months ago, the Linux 5.9 kernel series received today its last maintenance update as version 5.9.16. The kernel is now marked as EOL (End of Life) on the kernel.org website, and users are urged to consider upgrading to Linux kernel 5.10 LTS.

“This is the LAST 5.9.y kernel to be released unless something really odd happens. Please move to 5.10.y at this point in time, the 5.9.y branch is now end-of-life,” said Greg Kroah-Hartman in a mailing list announcement.

Linux kernel 5.10 is an LTS (Long-Term Support) branch, which means that it will receive support for at least a couple of years. It was released last week on December 13th and already received two maintenance updates, the latest version at the moment of writing being 5.10.2.

Besides being a long-term supported kernel series, which is already a very good reason to upgrade from Linux kernel 5.9, the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel introduces numerous new features and improvements.

Highlights include reduced latency of multiple file operations for the EXT4 file system, performance boost for fsync() operations for the Btrfs file system, support for the RISC-V architecture to boot on EFI systems, sleepless BPF programs, as well as the ability to transmit data on multiple flows simultaneously.

Of course, there are numerous other enhancements, as well as updated and new drivers for the best possible hardware support. As such, all Linux OS vendors are recommended to adopt the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series for their GNU/Linux distributions as soon as possible, now that Linux 5.9 reached end of life.

Linux kernel 5.10 LTS is available for download from kernel.org.

Last updated 3 years ago

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