Download Linux kernel 5.9

Linus Torvalds has version 5.9 of the Linux Kernel released. The kernel is the heart of the operating system and, simply put, it sits as a layer between the hardware and the applications. New in version 5.9 includes support for AMD’s RDNA2 and Intel Rocket Lake. More information about the improvements in this release can be found at Phoronix. Below is an overview of the main improvements in Linux Kernel 5.9:

Most Prominent Linux 5.9 Kernel Features:

• Initial support for AMD RDNA 2 graphics cards in the form of Sienna Cichlid and Navy Flounder.
• Intel Rocket Lake graphics support is also wired up, building off the existing Gen12 code. Intel also upstreamed more DG1 Xe graphics card support code albeit that remains a work in progress.
• Intel FSGSBASE support finally was mainlined after years of work with possible performance benefits going back to Ivy Bridge era CPUs as well as AMD CPUs.
• Various file-system improvements like performance work on Btrfs to FSCRYPT inline encryption and secure TRIM for F2FS. NVMe ZNS support also has come together for zoned namespaces with the NVMe 2.0 specification.
• Initial bring-up work for IBM POWER10 processors.
• Continued USB4 support work.
• Support for building the Linux x86 32-bit kernel using the LLVM Clang compiler, complementing the Clang support already for the Linux kernel on AArch64 and x86_64.
• ARM/ARM64 devices now default to the Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor for making use of scheduler utilization information for making more accurate CPU performance state decisions, similar to the Intel P-State push as well for using Schedutil by default.
• A safeguard to prevent “shims” from using GPL-only symbols that in turn are being used by proprietary kernel modules, following that recent controversy.