As expected, Linus Torvalds today officially released Linux 5.10. Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, this is a significant milestone in that it’s also a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel to be maintained for at least the next five years and also is a huge kernel update in general with many new features.
Linux 5.10 features new hardware support including early bring-up around Intel Rocket Lake and Alder Lake, continued work on Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics, a number of storage/file-system improvements, and more.
It will either trickle down to your distribution, or to the mainline repository you use.
There are quite a few improvements for the pi4 as well, namely the vc4 oss stuff has been mainlined now. Proper hardware acceleration at last?
One can only hope.
p13,
+1
I haven’t checked recently, but I’d really like for this to be the case too because the lack of mainline support has been a problem for so many years. There’s a lot of intriguing ARM SBC’s, but I look forward to the day when linux on ARM is as easy as linux on x86 and I’m not stuck using ancient unsupported kernel builds!
I’m a glad to read about the RPi 4 stuff, but at the same time I see it as a step in the RPi 4 becoming a serious GP computer, and so price creep management and energy efficiency go out the door when features are the main driver of sales.
I’m as guilty as any end user / developer in this regard, I want the new functionality, but beyond an initial interest will I ever make serious use of it?
It’s an interesting space.
IMO a ‘high end’ Raspberry Pi (a ‘poor mans’ Apple M1) would be very successful. That means two RAM slots, a proper M.2 SSD and a decent 8 core SoC in a mini ITX/NUC from factor.
I’m keen for a bog standard Raspberry PI to keep navigating a “minimally effective” baseline so it doesn’t expload into a waddling and expensive product which would defeat its purpose. On the other hand there is precendent of sorts if you view the Raspberry Pi as the new “BBC Micro” with the Compute Module being equivalent to the Acorn Electron and a more beefy system like you propose equivalent to an Acorn Archimedes.
I’m not a Linux nerd so usually tune this news out. Having a look though and rounding off the features for AMD GPUs is nice as is support for Raspberry Pi 4. There’s a small tweak in there for games on Wine.