After 2 months of development, Linus Torvalds – the Linux father – has released Linux kernel version 5.0 to the public after 8 release candidate.
As Linus pointed out, the 5.0 version is not because of Linux got big changes but because after 4.20 Linus cannot count the number using his fingers and toes.
The overall changes for all of the 5.0 release are much bigger. But I’d like to point out (yet again) that we don’t do feature-based releases, and that “5.0” doesn’t mean anything more than that the 4.x numbers started getting big enough that I ran out of fingers and toes.
Linux kernel 5.0 introduces some interesting changes, such as:
- Support for Adiantum file system encryption, Adiantum is Google’s drop-in replacement for the (controversial) NSA-developed Speck.
- Support for swap file in the btrfs file system
- FreeSync support in the AMDGPU open source graphic driver
- Raspberry Pi Touchscreen support in the mainline kernel
- Support for the Generic Receive Offload (GRO) feature in the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) implementation
- Numerous driver update
- New hardware support
- Bug and security fixes as usual
- And many more
The complete release email can be found here.