Linus Torvalds Welcomes 2019 with Linux 5.x

Jan 09, 2019

Better support for GPUs and CPUs.

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 5.0-rc1. The kernel was supposed to be 4.21, but he decided to move to the 5.x series. Torvalds has made it clear that the numbering of the kernel doesn’t make much sense. So don’t get too excited about this release.

Torvalds explained in the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List), “The numbering change is not indicative of anything special. If you want to have an official reason, it's that I ran out of fingers and numerology this time (we're _about_ 6.5M objects in the git repo), and there isn't any major particular feature that made for the release numbering either,” he said.

The release brings CPU and GPU improvements. In addition to support for AMD’s FreeSync display, it also comes with support for Raspberry Pi Touchscreen.

Talking about the ‘content’ of the kernel Torvalds wrote, “The stats look fairly normal. About 50% is drivers, 20% is architecture updates, 10% is tooling, and the remaining 20% is all over (documentation, networking, filesystems, header file updates, core kernel code..).”

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