The 13 Most Interesting Changes Of Linux 5.13 From Apple M1 To Security Enhancements

If all is looking well on Sunday, Linus Torvalds will be releasing Linux 5.13 as stable rather than going with a 5.13-rc8 test release and pushing the final version back by an additional release. In either case, Linux 5.13 is coming out soon and with many new features in tow.

After the merge window ended we published our usual Linux 5.13 feature overview. But for those that don't recall all those changes during the merge window from the end of April to early May, here is a recap of what's in store for this next kernel version with the most prominent changes worth mentioning.

- Initial support for the Apple M1 SoC and 2020 hardware platforms albeit this support is still early work-in-progress with no mainline support yet for the Apple M1 GPU, etc.

- The Landlock Linux security module has been merged after years in development for allowing unprivileged application sandboxing.

- Initial graphics support for Alder Lake S along with a lot of other Intel Alder Labe enablement that made it into Linux 5.13 like for Perf and other areas.

- AMDGPU FreeSync HDMI support is now mainline for allowing FreeSync on HDMI (pre v2.1) connections rather than just via DisplayPort.

- Initial support for Aldebaran as the next-gen AMD CDNA accelerator.

- a new Intel cooling driver to allow downclocking the CPU at a lower temperature threshold than the system default.

- A generic USB display driver for use-cases like turning a Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB-based display adapter.

- More performance enhancements to IO_uring and its growing adoption throughout the open-source ecosystem.

- Realtek RTL8156 and RTL8153D network adapter support. Meanwhile on the audio side is also some new Realtek hardware support.

- Amazon's Luna Game Controller now supported by the XPad driver.

- Touchpad and keyboard support for newer Microsoft Surface laptops that previously required using out-of-tree kernel code.

- Clang Control Flow Integrity support (CFI) for the mainline kernel for enhancing security with only minor run-time overhead.

- Randomizing the kernel stack offsets per system call as another kernel security improvements.