After two months of development, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 5.5 kernel. Among the most notable changes:
- the ability to assign alternative names to network interfaces,
- integration of cryptographic functions from the Zinc library,
- the ability to mirror to more than 2 disks in Btrfs RAID1,
- mechanism for tracking the status of Live patches,
- kunit unit testing framework,
- improving the performance of the mac80211 wireless stack,
- the ability to access the root partition via the SMB protocol,
- type checking in BPF.
The new version received 15505 fixes from 1982 developers, the patch size is 44 MB (the changes affected 11781 files, 609208 lines of code were added, 292520 lines were deleted). About 44% of all changes introduced in 5.5 are associated with device drivers, approximately 18% of changes are related to updating code specific to hardware architectures, 12% are related to the networking stack, 4% to file systems and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.
Source: linux.org.ru