Linux 5.0 is on its way, says maker Linus Torvalds. But according to him, there’s not much to be excited about. “The change in the number does not indicate anything special”, he wrote in his Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), reports ZDNet. “If you want to have an official reason, it’s because I didn’t have any fingers and toes left to add up, so 4.21 became 5.0.”
“Get loose. Make up your own reason for why this is 5.0,” says Torvalds. However, there are some significant changes in the new version. “50 percent is about drivers, 20 percent about updates to the architecture, 10 percent about tooling and the remaining 20 percent is about everything (documentation, networking, file systems, header file updates, core kernel code).
The most important changes are improvements to the graphics drivers. These include AMD FreeSync NVIDIA RTX Turing and support for Raspberry Pi Touch Display. The last driver allows Pi developers to create their own tablets or smart screens.
Another improvement in terms of graphics is a large version of the Terminus console font. This should make it a lot easier to read the font of a terminal on HiDPI screens as 4K screens.
Networking
The Linux developers have continued to work on removing the performance hit that occurred with the solutions for Spectre and Meltdown. Much of the work is in networking performance, which was slowed down by Google’s Retpoline solution.
WireGuard, a proposed built-in VPN in Linux, has not yet come to the kernel. Torvalds thinks WireGuard is a good idea, but it’s still being worked on. This also applies to the Linux 5.0 kernel. This is expected to be made available in February or early March. In the meantime, Torvalds proposes to test it. “Be the first to run a 5.0 pre-release kernel.”
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.