Lockable Linux kernel 5.4

Ο Linus Torvalds released the new Linux kernel 5.4 series, a major release that adds many new features, greater security and updated drivers for new hardware.

The Linux kernel 5.4 has been running since early October and had a total of eight Release Candidates. It has many new features such as support for Microsoft's exFAT file system, which was eventually integrated into the kernel.

Another major change that the Linux kernel 5.4 has is the core locking capability, something that offers extra security as it can restrict access to the kernel in some applications.

AMD's friends will be happy, as the Linux kernel 5.4 supports AMD Radeon Navi 12 and 14, AMD Radeon Arcturus GPUs, as well as AMD Dali APU. It also supports AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPUs and AMD EPYC microprocessors for improved load balancing.

It supports Intel Tiger Lake processors, Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoCs, and Intel Lightning Mountain SoC. It offers improved application memory management on Android, and features a new high performance virtio driver for file sharing between hosts and guests. It has a new security feature for detecting file corruption called fs-verity but also dm-clone for live live cloning of block devices.

The Linux kernel 5.4 5.4 source code is available for download from kernel.org if you want to do the compile yourself.

But keep in mind that at this time the new kernel is still in "mainline" state, which means that it is still considered a version that is not ready for mass adoption. The 5.4 version will become "stable" one or two weeks after its first release. so it would be a good idea to wait at least two weeks.