Linux Kernel 5.3 is Here. What’s New?

On September 15, Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 5.3 kernel series, after a delay of one week and eight release candidates. As ever, the new release loops in a range of modest but important changes.

What’s new with Linux Kernel 5.3?

• Support for Intel Speed Select to make power tuning much easier on certain Xeon servers,
• Support for AMD Radeon Navi graphics cards, such as the AMD Radeon RX5700, in the AMDGPU driver
• Support for Zhaoxin x86 processors
• Support for the utilization clamping mechanism in power-asymmetric CPUs
• New pidfd_open(2) system call that promises to help service managers to handle with PID reuse issues
• Support for the umwait x86 instructions for more power efficient userspace
• Support for the lightweight and flexible ACRN embedded hypervisor
• Support for 16 millions new IPv4 addresses in the 0.0.0.0/8 range
• New and updated drivers included in the Linux 5.3 kernel series, which you can download right now from here.
• Intel HDR display support for Icelake, Geminilake
• Compute shader support in Broadcom V3D driver
• RISC-V code improvements
• Utilisation clamping support in task scheduler
• Improved support for the NVIDIA Jetson Nano

See here for a complete breakdown of all the new features.

Get a FREE 7-Day Supported Trial of KernelCare 

Currently, 5.3 is a mainline kernel, which means it shouldn’t be used in production environments just yet. According to the announcement, Linux kernel 5.3 will be declared stable only when the first point release is announced. Linux Kernel 5.4 to be released by end of November 2019.

Once kernel 5.3 is live, it will be as important as ever not to delay patching. Linus Torvalds himself shared his thoughts on this in The Need for Rebootless Patching blog post. Make sure you never miss security patches and your kernels are always up-to-date with KernelCare. We apply security patches automatically to a running kernel. Live installation of security patches takes nanoseconds, doesn’t alter the performance of servers, doesn’t require a reboot, and quickly delivers a better, more secure Linux. We eliminate the need for staying up at night to deliver kernel patch updates, or coordinating downtime with your business units and various IT departments and locations.

Try KernelCare rebootless security updates now.

Read more: Happy 28th Birthday Linux!