Clever Geek Handbook

Linux Kernel 5.8: What's New With The Most Changed Kernel Ever





Linus Torvalds has finally presented the Linux 5.8 kernel release. We wrote about the planned innovations long before this event, but now the plans have become reality, so the changes can be discussed. The patch size was 65MB, 16180 files were affected, plus 1043,240 lines of code were added.



The most notable and anticipated innovations are:



  • KCSAN race condition detector ;
  • a universal mechanism for delivering notifications to user space;
  • inline encryption equipment support;
  • extended protection mechanisms for ARM64;
  • the ability to separately mount procfs instances;
  • implementation of the Shadow Call Stack and BTI protection mechanisms for ARM64.


The core also supports the Russian Baikal-T1 processor.



Now more about the changes.



They fall into several categories . These are virtualization and security, memory with system services, disk subsystem, file systems, networking subsystem, and hardware.



40% of changes in the new kernel are related to drivers, 16% - to code updates for various processor architectures, 10% - to the network stack, 3% - to file systems.


Virtualization and security



  • Added creation of separate procfs instances, which makes it possible to use several mount points at once with different options. This only reflects one pid namespace .
  • , . , — , , .
  • ARM64 Shadow-Call Stack. .
  • inline- (Inline Encryption).
  • initrdmem, initrd .
  • ARMv8.5-BTI (Branch Target Indicator). , .
  • capability: CAP_PERFMON — perf ; CAP_BPF — BPF.
  • virtio-mem .
  • CROSSTalk/SRBDS.




  • . pipe , .
  • KCSAN (Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer), .
  • Group memory.swap.high. , .
  • pidfd, PID.
  • faccessat2(). faccessat() , POSIX.
  • BPF iterator. .
  • padata .
  • API (AF_XDP), XDP- .
  • , 'master / slave' 'blacklist / whitelist'.








, I/O,



  • F2FS LZO-RLE.
  • CIFS nodele, .
  • Device Manager emulate block size. . — 512- 4.
  • Ext4 EXOSPC .
  • Ext4 XFS DAX .
  • EXFAT .
  • FAT . 2 , USB, 51 383, .




  • ethtool . , , , « ».
  • Media Redundancy Protocol. «» Ethernet-.
  • IPv6- .
  • IPv6 TCP-LD.




  • DRM- i915 Intel Intel Tiger Lake (GEN12). , SAGV (System Agent Geyserville). /.
  • Renesas RZ/G1H, Realtek RTD1195, Realtek RTD1395/RTD1619, Rockchips RK3326, AMLogic S905D, S905X3, S922XH, Olimex A20-OLinuXino-LIME-eMMC, Check Point L-50, Beacon i.MX8m-Mini, Qualcomm SDM660/SDM630, Xnano X5 TV Box, Stinger96, Beaglebone-AI.
  • AMD Zen Zen 2, AMD Ryzen 4000 Renoir.
  • amdgpu FP16 .
  • Nouveau NVIDIA.
  • MSM (Qualcomm) GPU Adreno A405, A640 A650.
  • Xiaomi Redmi Note 7, Samsung Galaxy S2 Elm/Hana Chromebook.
  • There is now support for the Russian Baikal-T1 processor and the BE-T1000 SoC .


After the kernel was released, the Free Software Foundation in Latin released a version of the free Linux-libre 5.8-gnu kernel . There are no proprietary components or code blocks that are limited by the manufacturer.



What changes will you need in your work? What is the most significant and demanded? Let's discuss in the comments.


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