A new Linux Kernel 5.9 was announced by Linus Torvalds. He wrote in his 5.9 announcement:
Ok, so I’ll be honest – I had hoped for quite a bit fewer changes this last week, but at the same time there doesn’t really seem to be anything particularly scary in here. It’s just more commits and more lines changed than I would have wished for.
Some of the significant features in this release are x86 FSGSBASE support, capacity awareness in the deadline scheduler, the close_range() system call, proactive compaction in the memory-management subsystem, the rationalization of kernel-thread priorities, and more.
More important to note in Kernel 5.9
- The FSGSBASE support is complete with this kernel version. That means you get a heavy performance boost for AMD and Intel systems because this support helps to context switch in OS during heavy work without kernel interaction.
- Toshiba USB 3.0 adapter and MCT USB 3.0 adapter support added.
- Bunch of performance improvements for IBM Thinkpad series.
- Radeon RX 6000 “RDNA ” graphics card and Intel Rocket Lake graphics card support.
- The upcoming USB 4 specification gets more support as work is underway for full support eventually in future kernel versions.
- More support for storage and file-system space. The Btrfs, F2FS seems performance improvements. More support is added for NVMe 2.0 spec for SSDs.
- IBM POWER10 processor sees initial work for support.
- Performance boost for ARM/ARM64 devices with optimized use of scheduler utilization information is added which is similar to Intel P-state push.
- Bug fixes on race conditions, memory leaks across modules.
