From those, LTS Kernel releases are the least frequent. They are generally supported for at least 2 years (often for 6 years, which is great!). They come with important new features, optimizations, and bug fixes. This is also the same for the Linux 5.10 LTS. But, this time, there are many changes and looks like a huge release to me.
This release gets even more interesting for the Android Open Source Project(AOSP) as it’s getting closer to the Mainline Linux Kernel. So, there’s a great chance with Linux 5.10 LTS, Android may finally become a pure Linux distribution. Which will be precious for Android vendors to maintain their devices’ security updates.
Key Changes in Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS
For technical details, you might want to refer the official changelog. Here, I shall mention some key changes compiled from Phoronix and the official log.
Improvements for Processors
Support added for Intel Rocket Lake CPUs, which is Intel’s next-generation CPU arriving in Q1, 2021.
Early support was added for Alder Lake and Meteor Lake.
Some performance improvements and fixes were added for AMD Zen 3 CPU architecture.
Added EFI boot support for RISC-V CPUs.
Rewrote ARM’s Spectre Mitigations as Ghostbusters. Previously that code was hard to maintain and now it clearly separates the state from policy and follows a more structured approach for mitigation.
Added SLDT/STR emulation for a better Wine experience. This will allow the Store Local Descriptor Table Register and Store Task Register to be spoofed by the kernel on User-Mode Instruction Prevention or UMIP enabled CPUs.
Added Meltdown Mitigation by KPTI on ARM guest session by Xen. KPTI or Kernel Page Table Isolation is a Linux Kernel feature that mitigates the Meltdown security vulnerability and hardens kernel against an attempt to bypass KASLR or Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization.
AMD SEV-ES support added for further securing guest VMs on KVM. Secure Encrypted Virtualization will now help AMD EPYC processors for better-securing guest virtual machines and public clouds. This feature will enable hardware memory encryption using one key per VM, the protection will enforce not only between guests but also the hypervisor.
Lots of AMD and Intel processor fixes and improvements covering cache, paging, and new instruction support.
Graphics
Added Intel’s next-generation graphics card (Xe) support in the process.
Added Intel Tiger Lake HOBL support to extend battery life.
Brought many open-source DRM(Direct Rendering Manager) updates.
Storage and File System
Fixed XFS the year 2038 problem(where Unix epoch time no longer fits into a 32-bit integer) and now it’ll support until July 2486 and XFS will deprecate the V4 file system format in 2030.
Improved F2FS across ATGC(Age Threshold Garbage Collector), faster file decompression, NVMe, generic casefolding, ZNS(Zoned NameSpace) support, and a lot more.
Improved inode in the allocation group will cause less time needed for mount.
