Now available to download for all GNU/Linux distros

May 6, 2019 01:43 GMT  ·  By

Linus Torvalds has announced today the release of the Linux 5.1 kernel series, a featureful kernel branch that brings lots of great additions, as well as improvements to existing features.

After one and a half months in development, the Linux 5.1 kernel  series is finally here, and we can tell you all about its new features and enhancements. First and foremost, we'd like to remind everyone out there attempting to grab and install Linux kernel 5.1 that this isn't a long-term supported branch, so you better stick with your current LTS kernel instead.

"The past week has been pretty calm, and the final patch from rc6 is not all that big," said Linus Torvalds in a mailing list announcement. "On the whole, 5.1 looks very normal with just over 13k commits (plus another 1k+ if you count merges). Which is pretty much our normal size these days. No way to boil that down to a sane shortlog, with work all over."

Here's what's new in Linux kernel 5.1

Highlights of Linux kernel 5.1 include the ability to use persistent memory as RAM (system memory) in addition to the physical RAM, more preparations for year 2038, the ability to boot the system to a device-mapper device without using initramfs, as well as support for cumulative patches for the live kernel patching feature.

For fans of the Btrfs file system, the Linux 5.1 kernel series finally allows users to configure Zstd compression levels. In addition, the fanotify-based file system monitorization feature was improved by adding a so-called "super block root watch" functionality to the fanotify interface, which scalably watches changes on large filesystems.

Other than that, Linux kernel 5.1 introduces a high-performance interface called io_uring, which makes asynchronous I/O fast and scalable, a new method that permits safe signal delivery in the presence of PID reuse, as well as a new cpuidle governor called Timer Events Oriented or TEO for short, which promises to improve power management without affecting power consumption.

Of course, there are numerous updated and new drivers included in Linux kernel 5.1, which will make it compatible with even more hardware. You can download the Linux kernel 5.1 sources right now from kernel.org or via our free Linux software portal if you want to compile it on your GNU/Linux distribution, but we recommend waiting for the first point release to hit the streets later this month.