A Kidney Stone Could Not Stop Linus Torvalds from Releasing Linux Kernel 4.13

Just months after the release of Linux Kernel 4.12 which had support for Nvidia’s GTX 1000 Pascal and AMD’s new Radeon RX Vega graphics card, Linus Torvalds has gone ahead to officially release Linux Kernel 4.13.

According to the release on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Linus said he saw no reason delaying the release of 4.13 even though “last week was actually somewhat eventful”.

He continued to inform public on how he passed “seven hours of pure agony due to a kidney stone”. In a more welcoming note, he said “I’m all good, but it sure _felt_ a lot longer than seven hours, and I don’t even want to imagine what it is for people that have had the experience drag out for longer. Ugh”.

One of the most important changes seen in Linux 4.13 is the generic protocol security issue where users have to be aware of the behavior change before thinking of upgrading.

This comes from the default cifs behavior. Users have been asked to use SMB 3.0 instead of SMB 1.0 as default cifs mount. He said users “shouldn’t have been using SMB1”, though some must have been “blithely continued using SMB1 without thinking about it”.

However, they can continue to use it but need to be aware of the recent default change. Users have also been advised to preferably use “vers=2.1” because SMB1 “is just bad, bad, bad”.

Other changes that could be seen are the DRM sync object, AMD Raven Ridge and initial Cannonlake supports, a new DMA mapping system, subsystem merging of MUX, enhanced hardware support and others.

Linux Kernel 4.13 features

Major Feature Changes in this release are:

• Initial Intel Cannonlake and Coffeelake support

• DRM synchronization object support has been merged to core DRM

• There have been many fixes for Vega and AMD Raven Ridge support which is new on the AMDGPU DRM. There is no display support for Raven / Vega since the DC/DAL code wasn’t merged.

• The pl111 display controller code has been merged

• Thunderbolt improvements

• cpu_cooling integration with CPUFreq and POWER saw some improvement and updates respectively

• F2FS has been improved and now supports statx for enhanced file information. EXT4 also supports “largedir” feature which now lets about two billion entries in one directory as against ten million in the previous. XFS has been enhanced also to support SEEK_HOLE and SEEK_DATA.

Check out Phoronix to get additional features of Linux Kernel 4.13.

Get Linux Kernel 4.13

Your distribution might provide it in near or distant future. I advise waiting for it but if you can’t, get it from kernel.org. Ubuntu users can easily upgrade kernel thanks to GUI tool Ukuu.

Don’t forget to share your views on the new Linux Kernel 4.13 features in the comment section.