Linux Kernel 5.8

Linux

Earlier this week Linux Kernel 5.8 was released, improving stability and introducing new features.

I’d like to learn more about the following things in Linux Kernel 5.8:

• virtualization improvements – independent procfs instances sound really cool, virtio-mem device supports hot plugging guest VMs memory
• KCSAN (Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer) - I’m not a kernel developer but would really like to understand this technology better. Seems to be a toolkit for race conditions debugging in kernel space.
• BPF iterator - BPF is another must-have skill for advanced Linux administration these days, with this kernel version there is now a mechaism for dumping kernel data structures into user space
• filesystem improvements - as always, lots of things got better for Ext4, XFS and even CIFS (nodelete flag)

I will probably upgrade Linux Mint 20.0 to Linux Kernel 5.8 over this weekend.

See Also

• Linux Kernel
• Unix Tutorial Digests
• Linux Kernel 5.4
• Confirm current Kernel boot command
• Linux Commands
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1