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Linux Kernel 5.10 is officially out now as a Long Term Support release

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A brand new Long Term Support release is out now with the Linux Kernel 5.10, the very beating heart of the whole Linux system which brings plenty of new features and hardware support.

With it being a new LTS, it's going to get updates and bug fixes for a much longer time than usual providing a good solid base for at least two years for Linux distributions. Apart from that, here's some of the bigger changes:

  • Ext4 fast commit support, for faster metadata performance
  • Nintendo Switch controller support for both Joy-Cons and Pro controllers
  • Support for the Mayflash Sega Saturn Adaptor
  • Sound Blaster AE-7 is now supported
  • XFS file system now won't crash and burn in the year 2038
  • Raspberry Pi VC4 support pulled in
  • Thunderbolt/USB4 supported on Intel Tiger Lake-H
  • Working headphones with the ASUS TM420
  • Thinkpad P1 Gen 3 and Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 3 get a working Headset Button
  • More work done for new upcoming Intel chipsets for Rocket Lake and Alder Lake
  • The k10temp temperature sensor driver now supports AMD Zen3 CPUs
  • The Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs now officially supports the Bifrost generation
  • + a whole lot more

For a full rundown check out Kernel Newbies article.

In the announcement, Torvalds mentions about being more strict over the Kernel 5.11 development cycle due to the holidays coming up so ideally they only want what is actually ready to be pulled in. Fair enough at this time of year, there will be far less people around with time to spare for feedback on patches. 

Upgrading will depend on your distribution. Ubuntu gets major Kernel upgrades through new releases of the distribution along with HWE (Hardware Enablement) for LTS releases, while others like Arch will gradually pull them in for you to switch.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Kernel, Update
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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8 comments

Koopacabras Dec 14, 2020
I already installed it, don't know why but now I had to comment out every module that pre loads at boot time in the file

/etc/modules-load.d/modules.conf
after that it boots fine, must be some behaviour that has changed?


Last edited by Koopacabras on 14 December 2020 at 11:30 am UTC
dorron Dec 14, 2020
Can't move to this kernel until they release an update to virtualbox...
elmapul Dec 14, 2020
"Sound Blaster AE-7 is now supported"
this model was relased july 2019?
WorMzy Dec 14, 2020
LTS, eh? It's off to a cracking start. :P

In case anyone did already update, you probably want to downgrade or jump to 5.10.1 ASAP.
tuubi Dec 14, 2020
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Quoting: WorMzyLTS, eh? It's off to a cracking start. :P

In case anyone did already update, you probably want to downgrade or jump to 5.10.1 ASAP.

Only affects some raid setups and causes no permanent damage. No panic. :)
Avehicle7887 Dec 14, 2020
Quoting: dorronCan't move to this kernel until they release an update to virtualbox...

Unless you're using VirtualBox for something important, I would highly giving a look at Virtual Machine Manager (uses QEMU/KVM). I can't see myself going back to VMWare Player or VBox after that.
AciD Dec 15, 2020
Quoting: Avehicle7887Unless you're using VirtualBox for something important, I would highly giving a look at Virtual Machine Manager (uses QEMU/KVM). I can't see myself going back to VMWare Player or VBox after that.
Sorry for high-jacking the thread, but could you please elaborate?

I've tried Virtual Machine Manager and somehow I found the UX to be pretty bad compared to Virtualbox.
What does VMM do better than Vbox in your opinion?
slaapliedje Dec 30, 2020
Quoting: elmapul"Sound Blaster AE-7 is now supported"
this model was relased july 2019?
ha, I bought one of these because I'd read on reddit that it was already supported... Well it wasn't mainstreamed yet, so wasn't really working right, even though it was detected and I configured it, I couldn't actually get it to produce sound. So I pulled it back out of my system. I bought it initially because I was hearing a popping in the onboard realtek crap. Well that started to go away, but I still have the AEX-7, so hopefully I can put it back into my system shortly.
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