After two months of development, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux kernel 5.5. Among the most notable changes are:
- the ability to assign alternative names to network interfaces,
- integration of cryptographic functions from the Zinc library,
- the ability to mirror more than 2 disks in Btrfs RAID1,
- a mechanism for tracking the state of Live patches,
- the kunit unit testing framework,
- increased performance of the mac80211 wireless stack,
- the ability to access the root partition via the SMB protocol,
- type verification in BPF.
The new version includes 15,505 fixes from 1,982 developers, with a patch size of 44 MB (the changes affected 11,781 files, adding 609,208 lines of code and removing 292,520 lines). About 44% of all changes in 5.5 are related to device drivers, around 18% pertain to updates of architecture-specific code, 12% is related to the networking stack, 4% to file systems, and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.
Source: linux.org.ru
