Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.7 on the kernel mailing list. In his release announcement he commented: “So last week we were fairly calm, with no screams of ‘let’s drag out one more rc’. Fingers crossed — hopefully we won’t have another situation like in 5.6, where a wifi regression landed at the last minute.”
The main new features of Linux 5.7 include: the task scheduler supports thermal pressure — when the CPU overheats, the thermal governor limits the CPU’s maximum frequency and reduces its maximum available compute capacity; if the task scheduler doesn’t perceive this frequency change, its scheduling decisions will assume more available compute capacity than there actually is; removing Microsoft’s exFAT implementation and adding Samsung’s exFAT; Split Lock detection; frequency-invariant scheduler; ARM kernel pointer authentication support to prevent pointer tampering and reduce security vulnerabilities; userfaultfd() write-protection support; a BPF-based security module bpf-lsm; and more. See KernelNewbies 5.7: https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.7.
Linus said, “But despite the awkward last-minute regression last time, things look fine. Most of the discussions I’ve seen in the last week or two have been about features for the upcoming release, so the merge window is now open and I’ll start processing requests as usual tomorrow. But in the meantime, do settle down a bit.”
In addition, Linus revealed, “As usual, we had a lot of changes in 5.7 (all the statistics look normal, but ‘normal’ for us is obviously quite large, meaning ‘starting from nearly two thousand developers, almost 14,000 non-merge commits’), so the appended short log is just some of the small stuff that appeared since rc7 last week.”
Linux Kernel 5.7 includes many new features and improvements, such as Apple USB “Fast Charge” drivers; Intel Tiger Lake “Gen12” graphics are now considered stable and have left the experimental flag; and the well-regarded AMD Renoir graphics; F2FS Zstd support; and Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 support, among others.