Linux Kernel 5.13 rolls out with early Apple M1 support

Another Linux Kernel release is out now with Linux 5.13 bringing with it, amongst plenty of other things, initial and early support for the new Apple M1 chip.

In the announcement Linus Torvalds mentioned that while they had a "calm week" since the seventh release candidate, the Linux Kernel 5.13 is "actually fairly large" and "one of the bigger 5.x releases" with over sixteen thousand commits from over two thousand developers so it's a "big all over" sort of thing with new features , fixes and improvements everywhere.

What's new? The full changelog can be seen on Kernel.org but it doesn't exactly make for good reading. Here's a quick highlight of some of it:

• Initial Apple M1 support - very early and don't expect too much to work well, not exactly production ready
• Apple Magic Mouse 2 support
• Added support for the Amazon Luna controller
• More work on the upcoming Intel DG1 graphics card
• The beginnings of support for an upcoming AMD Alderbran architecture
• AMD Freesync HDMI support
• A new WMI Gigabyte motherboard temperature monitoring driver
• More work to better support Microsoft Surface devices
• Drivers for NZXT Kraken X42/X52/X62/X72
• Some Thrustmaster wheels had problems initialising which has been solved
• Landlock is quite an interesting one that has been merged. It's a new security feature to enable restricting rights for a set of processes that helps sandbox user-space applications.

And of course the list goes on for quite some time, those are just some interesting standouts that some of you Linux gamers might perhaps be interested in knowing.

How to install? Well, that all depends on your distribution with each providing their own way.