Today Linus Torvalds has announced the release of the new stable version of Linux Kernel, Linux 5.2. This release adds several new fature, drivers update and many more improvements.
On the mailing list announcement, Torvalds says:
“So I was somewhat pre-disposed towards making an rc8, simply because of my travels and being entirely off the internet for a few days last week, and with spotty internet for a few days before that”
“So despite a fairly late core revert, I don’t see any real reason for another week of rc, and so we have a v5.2 with the normal release timing.”
Linux 5.2 features overview:
- Sound Open Firmware, an open-source firmware that provides support for DSP audio devices
- A new mount API for mounting file systems
- New open-source GPU drivers for ARM Mali devices
- Support for case-insensitive names in the EXT4 file system
- Performance improvements to the BFQ I/O scheduler
- Implements a new device mapper
- And many more
On the security area, this new release comes with a fix that protects devices against the Intel MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) vulnerabilities. Linux 5.2 also comes witha new architecture-independent boot option called “mitigations=” to make it easier to enable or disable mitigations for CPU flaws.