Linux 5.8: Key Features & Changes

If you were expecting Linux 5.8 to be one of the ‘biggest kernel releases’ in a long time you had good reason Linus hyped things up as such when the merge window for this release opened. Sadly you will need to put some brakes on your expectations.

Linux 5.8 is a pretty standard release. Not too big. Not too small. Just kinda there, doing everything the last kernel did (okay, and a bit more) better.

We’ve been spoiled by headline change after headline change in the last few releases, and that couldn’t continue.

Still, there are some new features and key changes worth knowing about, including:

• New AMD energy driver for Zen/Zen2 energy sensors
• AMD Renoir CPU temperature monitoring
• AMD Renoir ACP audio support
• AMDGPU Trusted Memory Zone Support
• Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer
• Boost support in the CPPC CPUFreq driver
• Open Source Adreno 405 / 640 / 650 GPU support
• Shadow Call Stack and Branch Target Identification for ARM64
• More exFAT driver improvements
• Thunderbolt ARM (i.e. USB 4.0) support
• Intel Atom camera driver
• Ability to swap fn and ctrl keys on Apple keyboards