Recently, Linus Torvalds (hereinafter referred to as "Linus") announced that the official version of Linux Kernel 5.19 can finally meet with you. This release is significant, and while it was released a week later than originally planned, it brings more new features, hardware support, and a slew of bug and security fixes.
However, none of the above is the most pleasant surprise. What Linus relishes the most is that he used the Asahi Linux project to release a new version of the Linux kernel on the MacBook Air equipped with the M2 chip .
Step by step to "Embrace ARM64"
Linus said in the email: "Personally, I think the most interesting part is that I released the official version of Linux Kernel 5.19 on an ARM64 laptop and wrote this email . It's something I've been looking forward to for a long time, thank you The Asahi team, made this a reality. Although we have been using ARM64 hardware to run Linux for a while, it hasn't really been used as a development platform until now. "
This is the third time Linus has used Apple hardware for Linux development. A long time ago, he developed for PowerPC on a Macintosh G5 device equipped with a PPC970 processor (developed by IBM) ; the second time was the first-generation MacBook Air more than ten years ago; and now, Linus has Operating on the ultra-thin notebook MacBook Air equipped with M2 chip, it can be seen that he has a considerable obsession with developing Linux on Apple hardware.
Linus said: "I'm not using the MacBook Air for any real work at this stage, I'm just using it for version testing, booting and now release. But I will try to migrate work to this MacBook, maybe next I was able to fully embrace ARM64 in the next release."
For most Linux users, it doesn't Linus is currently using, and Asahi Linux is still in its rough early days. But using modern versions of the ARM instruction set and "closer to upstream cores" has a knock-on effect that benefits the rest of the ecosystem .
More people using ARM versions of Linux means more people fixing ARM-related bugs, which will benefit all distributions. Ultimately, the experience of using Linux on ARM hardware will improve for everyone, although these benefits may take years to manifest.
Other important changes in Linux Kernel 5.19
With the release of the Linux 5.19 kernel version, it also supports the self-developed instruction set of the domestic CPU Godson. Linus also said that this is an important step.
In addition, there are some important changes in the Linux 5.19 kernel that are worth noting:
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Supports Intel's Domain of Trust extension to isolate virtual machines from the hypervisor/hypervisor and any other software on the platform to increase the isolation that can be achieved with traditional virtualization.
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Support for AMD's SEV-SNP, which protects virtual machines from attacks on the hypervisor.
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Multi-platform support for Arm is almost complete.
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Improved monitoring of ASUS motherboards.
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Removed support for the Renesas H8/300 CPU architecture, which had the odd feature of being removed from the kernel and then reinstated.
Linus said at the end of the email that he planned to change the next version of the kernel from Linux 5.20, which was originally named after the version number, to Linux 6.0, because he began to worry that everyone would be confused by "big numbers" again . This practice is slightly inconsistent with the 4.x series. The previous version came to Linux 5.0 after the release of Linux 4.20. The current practice follows the same scheme used by the 3.x series, which stopped at 3.19.
Currently, those who prefer to compile the kernel can now download the Linux 5.19 source tarball from the kernel.org website . Everyone else has to wait for the maintainers of their distributions to upgrade the kernel to version 5.19 before attempting to update their installations to the new Linux kernel series.
Reference link: https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/7/31/295
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