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Yesterday, Linus Torvalds, announced the stable release of Linux 5.0. This release comes with AMDGPU FreeSync support, Raspberry Pi touch screen support and much more.
According to Torvalds, “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.”

Features of Linux 5.0

  1. AMDGPU FreeSync support, which will improve the display of fast-moving images and will prove advantageous especially for gamers. According to CRN, this will also make Linux a better platform for dense data visualizations and support “a dynamic refresh rate, aimed at providing a low monitor latency and a smooth, virtually stutter-free viewing experience.”
  2. Support for the Raspberry Pi’s official touch-screen. All information is copied into a memory mapped area by RPi’s firmware, instead of using a conventional bus.
  3. Energy-aware scheduling feature, that lets the task scheduler to take scheduling decisions resulting in lower power usage on asymmetric SMP platforms. This feature will use Arm’s big.LITTLE CPUs and help achieve better power management in phones
  4. Adiantum file system encryption for low power devices.
  5. Btrfs can support swap files, but the swap file must be fully allocated as “nocow” with no compression on one device.
  6. Support for binderfs, a binder filesystem that will help run multiple instances of Android and is backward compatible.
  7. Improvement to reduce Fragmentation by over 90%. This results in better transparent hugepage (THP) usage.
  8. Support for Speculation Barrier (SB) instruction This is introduced as part of the fallout from Spectre and Meltdown.

The merge window for 5.1 is now open. Read Linux’s official documentation for the detailed list of upgraded features in Linux 5.0.

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Melisha Dsouza