Linux Kernel 5.1 Gets First Point Release, It's Now Ready for Mass Deployments

[The AchieVer]

Linux Kernel 5.1 Gets First Point Release, It's Now Ready for Mass Deployments 

 

The recently released Linux 5.1 kernel series received its first  point release over the weekend, which marks it as a stable kernel branch ready for mass deployments.

 

Announced by Linus Torvalds on May 6th, the Linux 5.1 kernel series brings numerous new features and improvements, among which we can mention better file system monitorization, new cpuidle governor called TEO, support for configuring Zstd compression levels in Btrfs, and the ability to boot to a device-mapper device without using initramfs.

Linux kernel 5.1 also adds support for cumulative patches in live kernel patching, the ability to use persistent memory as RAM, faster and more scalable asynchronous I/O, support for delivering safe signals in presence of PID reuse, more preparations for the year 2038, and lots of new and updated drivers.Now ready for mass deploymentsNow, just one week later, the Linux kernel 5.1.1 was released by Greg Kroah-Hartman, who will maintain the Linux 5.1 kernel series until its end of life, thus marking it as stable on the kernel.org website instead of mainline, which is still considered a development version. This means that all GNU/Linux distributions can now adopt the latest Linux kernel 5.1.

"I'm announcing the release of the 5.1.1 kernel. All users of the 5.1 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman in a mailing list announcement. "The updated 5.1.y git tree can be found at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary."

Linux kernel 5.1.1 is a small update that changes a total of 36 files, with 715 insertions and 536 deletions. If you want to upgrade your GNU/Linux distribution to the Linux 5.1 kernel series, we recommend waiting for the latest version to land in the stable software repositories.

 

 

 

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Google and Collabora Add Major Change to Linux Kernel 5.1 for Chrome OS Devices 

 

Collabora and Google engineers have been working on a new, exciting new feature that would benefit users of Chrome OS and Android devices, which recently landed in the latest Linux 5.1 kernel series.

 

According to Collabora's latest report on their contributions to the Linux 5.1 kernel, which arrived last week, it is now possible to mount and boot a mapped device by adding a kernel parameter via command-line at boot time, thus bypassing initramfs image. For Linux kernel 5.1, twelve Collabora's developers also contributed 64 commits and 111 sign-offs, along with lots of bug reports and testing.

"Helen Koike contributed a major change, providing a mechanism to mount a mapped device at boot time through a kernel command line parameter, removing the current initramfs requirement," said Collabora's André Almeida. "This change is the result of the combined effort of both Google and Collabora engineers to push upstream a feature that is shipped on Chrome OS devices and Android devices using AVB 2.0."

All previous kernel versions required the presence of an initramfs image to boot the system to a file system locate in a device-mapper device, but there were many cases where users couldn't use an initramfs image, so this new feature comes in handy when you want to boot to a device-mapper device without the need of an initramfs image, just by using a simple kernel boot parameter.Highlights from Collabora's contributions to Linux kernel 5.1Besides adding support for booting to a device-mapper device without using initramfs, Collabora's engineers added several goodies to the Linux 5.1 kernel, including support for the NanoPC-T4 single-board computer, support for the AM335x-based Bosch Guardian and i.MX6 Phytec phyBOARD Segin ARM boards, and pinmuxing support for Raspberry Pi 3 model B board.

They also enabled HDMI audio on RK3399 Rock960 platforms, improved support for the RK3399 RockPI board, fixed handling of USB descriptors in FunctionFS, improved DRM subsystem's DRM_AUTH implementation, added support for mirroring and plane rotation on RK3288 and RK3399 SoCs, fixed a bug in the vivid driver, and updated ISP1704 USB Charger Detection to use the new GPIO API.

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