Linux 5.8 Released With AMD Energy Driver, F2FS LZO-RLE, IBM POWER10 Booting

Linus Torvalds was debating up to the last minutes today of whether to opt for Linux 5.8-rc8 or go ahead and release Linux 5.8 as stable... He opted for Linux 5.8 splashing down on this historic day.

Linus wrote in the 5.8 release announcement that despite this cycle being very large, it turned out fairly well and didn't need a 5.8-rc8 release. Though due to some last minute changes, he does dream of having a sort of SAT-solver for symbol dependencies that would work across architectures and configurations for cleaning up the Linux kernel header file dependency mess. But that for now is just a dream.

As for changes over the past week, there was also a security fix making it harder to guess the network RNG's internal state.

See our Linux 5.8 feature overview for all the exciting changes from an AMD Energy Driver for Zen/Zen2 CPUs to new F2FS compression capabilities, POWER10 CPUs starting to boot with the mainline kernel code, power management improvements, and much more. This is also the first major kernel release featuring the new inclusive terminology guidelines.

Linux 5.8 is the kernel that should be found by default in the likes of Ubuntu 20.10.

Onward now to what will be an exciting Linux 5.9 kernel cycle.