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Linux Kernel 5.3 Released By Linus Torvalds With Support For AMD Navi GPUs

After 8 release candidates, Linus Torvalds has finally released Linux Kernel 5.3. It is a major upgrade that brings many new features in terms of better hardware support, changes specific to Arm architecture and a couple of bug fixes.

The extra release candidate RC8, as Torvalds says, was because of his busy travel schedule. Nonetheless, RC8 has allowed developers to bring in some essential bug fixes.

In his announcement post, Linus Torvalds mentions that the RC8 has helped in adding fixes for some bad btrfs behavior and spelling fixes.

Here are the major changes in Linux Kernel 5.3 :

1. Support Added For AMD Navi GPUs And Zhaoxin CPUs

Linux kernel 5.3 has introduced support for AMD Navi graphics cards for Radeon RX 5700 series. Additionally, x86 Zhaoxin CPUs derived from VIA x86 technology are also supported now

2. Support For Intel Speed Select

The new Linux kernel now supports Intel Speed Select technology, which was introduced with Intel Cascade Lake processors. It allows users to configure a single server according to the workload. Intel SST offers an interface for controlling and directing base frequency of cores.

3. New Arm SoCs and boards

The latest kernel update brings support for new Arm SoCs and boards. One of the notable additions is NVIDIA Jetson Nano.

4. New pidfd_open(2) System Call

In the mainline release, Linus Torvalds has also added a new pdifd_open(2) system call which is touted to help service managers in managing PID reuse issues efficiently.

With this release, Linux kernel 5.4 merge window is now open with its release scheduled for November.

You can download Linux kernel 5.3 from kernel.org.

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