The new Linux kernel 5.17 has already been released
As we pointed out a few days ago, the launch of the new Linux kernel was scheduled for today, March 20, after it was delayed. Today Linus Torvalds has finally released version 5.17 of the Linux kernel.
This new version of the kernel includes some important improvements that ensure better kernel performance and security. Now it only remains to wait for the distributions to incorporate it as part of their system. In the meantime, let's review what those improvements were included.
Main innovations included in the new Linux kernel
The most outstanding features of version 5.17 are the following:
Four-level page table support in the RISC-V silicon, which means the open source technology can handle 64TB of physical memory or twice that in a virtual address space. This kind of scaling makes RISC-V potentially more applicable to all kinds of high-end workloads.
A new P - state driver from AMD that improves the ability for users to change the CPU frequency on cores using the Zen 2 design and later. The driver primarily improves the performance of homebrew processors, but AMD's EPYC processors also use the Zen architecture.
Tweaks that ensure the ability to overclock the upcoming “Alder Lake” mobile CPUs to turbo speed across their many and varied cores.
Mitigation of new Specter-like issues on Intel and AMD CPUs.
Being Linux, the new version also includes an oddity in the form of a fix for an old bug that could cause the operating system to crash when a floppy was ejected.
Obviously floppies are no longer used for a long time, so the fix for this bug is more of a curiosity than a real feature.
"So we had an extra week at the end of this release cycle, and I'm happy to report that it was very quiet," Torvalds wrote in his weekly kernel status post. "We could probably have skipped it without too much trouble, but we did manage to do some last-minute rollbacks and fixes and avoid some bugs that would otherwise have affected stability, so it's all good," he added.
New kernel version 5.18 announced
Linus Torvalds took the opportunity to talk about the next version of the kernel, 5.18, which he will start working on. He even said that he had started receiving many pull requests.
According to Torvalds himself, the 5.18 update is going to be much bigger than the 5.17 ones. No other information has been given regarding this new version, and that is because its development has not yet begun, but probably in the coming weeks we will have news on this subject.