Linux 5.1 Should Be Released Today With IO_uring, Faster zRAM, More Icelake

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 5 May 2019 at 07:46 AM EDT. 11 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
Linus Torvalds will be celebrating Cinco de Mayo today with the anticipated release of the Linux 5.1 kernel.

Barring any last minute regrets causing Linus to opt for a 5.1-rc8 test release, Linux 5.1.0 will be out today. Last week Torvalds indicated he was feeling like the release should be ready this weekend as opposed to kicking in an extra RC.

For those that don't recall all of the changes of this next stable kernel, see our Linux 5.1 feature overview. The work exciting us the most is Intel Fastboot being enabled by default for newer hardware, various security improvements, the ability to use persistent memory as system RAM, IO_uring is quite interesting for faster and more efficient I/O, Intel 22260 WiFi support, Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ mainline kernel support, continuing to square away Icelake hardware support, and a lot of smaller changes.

Stay tuned this evening to see if Linux 5.1 successfully makes it out, which will mark the opening of the Linux 5.2 merge window. Linux 5.2 is looking to be even bigger and one of the biggest feature updates to this open-source kernel in a while.

For those wondering about the size of Linux 5.1, here is the cloc output as of 5.1 Git this morning... 17.8 million lines of code, 3.3 million lines of comments, and 3.2 million blank lines.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                             files          blank        comment           code
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C                                    26890        2659245        2310507       13538508
C/C++ Header                         19361         514635         924515        3785811
Assembly                              1325          47219         105151         229436
JSON                                   222              0              0         142205
make                                  2466           9043           9589          39721
Bourne Shell                           495           9683           8153          39653
Perl                                    54           5414           4001          27400
Python                                 119           4029           4116          21197
HTML                                     5            656              0           5446
yacc                                     9            697            376           4616
YAML                                    35            596            296           3317
PO File                                  5            791            918           3061
lex                                      8            330            321           2004
C++                                      8            300             82           1871
Bourne Again Shell                      51            354            320           1748
awk                                     11            171            155           1387
TeX                                      1            108              3            915
Glade                                    1             58              0            603
NAnt script                              2            142              0            535
Markdown                                 2            133              0            423
Cucumber                                 1             28             49            168
Windows Module Definition                2             14              0            103
m4                                       1             15              1             95
CSS                                      1             27             28             72
XSLT                                     5             13             26             61
vim script                               1              3             12             27
Ruby                                     1              4              0             25
INI                                      1              1              0              6
sed                                      1              2              5              5
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                                 51084        3253711        3368624       17850419
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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