The new version is coming soon to a distro near you

Feb 19, 2017 23:10 GMT  ·  By

As expected, Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability of the Linux 4.10 kernel series, which adds a great number of improvements, new security features, and support for the newest hardware components.

Linux kernel 4.10 has been in development for the past seven weeks, during which it received a total of eight RC (Release Candidate) snapshots that implemented all the changes that you'll soon be able to enjoy on your favorite Linux-based operating system.

"On the whole, 4.10 didn't end up as small as it initially looked. After the huge release that was 4.9, I expected things to be pretty quiet, but it ended up very much a fairly average release by modern kernel standards. So we have about 13,000 commits (not counting merges - that would be another 1200+ commits if you count those)," said Linus Torvalds in today's announcement.

Prominent new features include virtual GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) support, new "perf c2c" tool that can be used for analysis of cacheline contention on NUMA systems, support for the L2/L3 caches of Intel processors (Intel Cache Allocation Technology), eBPF hooks for cgroups, hybrid block polling, and better writeback management.

A new "perf sched timehist" feature has been added in Linux kernel 4.10 to provide detailed history of task scheduling, and there's experimental writeback cache and FAILFAST support for MD RAID5. All the details about these new features can be studied at https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.10.

File system improvements, updated drivers

As expected, Linux kernel 4.10 comes with many improvements for various supported file systems, including EXT4, F2FS, XFS, OverlayFS, NFS, CIFS, UBIFS, BEFS, and LOGFS. The ARM architecture support was greatly improved, and numerous drivers have been updated, especially for AMD Radeon GPUs.

Linux kernel 4.10 is now considered the mainline kernel, which means that even it it's the most advanced version available on the market, it's not yet recommended for deployment in Linux-based operating systems. However, you can download the tarball right now from kernel.org or via our website if you want to become an early adopter.

The rest of the world will be able to enjoy the new Linux 4.10 kernel series once it receives its first point release, namely Linux kernel 4.10.1, which will automatically mark the branch as stable and ready for deployment in production environments. Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) could be the first stable OS to ship with Linux 4.10.