Termed as one of the biggest Kernel releases by the creator Linus Torvalds, Linux 5.8 has now reached the end of life after maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the 5.8.18 point release.
After the release, he said, “This is the LAST 5.8.y release to be made. This branch is now end-of-life. Please move to the 5.9.y kernel branch at this point.”
Linux 5.8 was released on August 2nd, 2020, and brought tonnes of changes and improvements to the Kernel. Some of the major changes and features were; support for LZO-RLE compression in the F2F file system, a new faccessat2() system call, CAP_PERFMON functionality, inline encryption for block layer, and a new initrdmem= boot option, which can be used to specify the initial RAM disk image.
Some of the other things that it introduced are Shadow Call Stack for Arm64 architecture, a new mechanism for revoking mappings in /dev/mem, and solved the CrossTalk hardware vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs.
Also Read: Raspberry Pi 4 Gets and Impressively Solid Android 11 Port
Linux 5.9, on the other hand, also brings lots of changes such as Zstandard Compression support, inline encryption support for EXT4 and F2FS filesystems, and brings Unicore architecture to the mix.
Meanwhile, most of the rolling-release distributions have started moving to Linux 5.9 and considering it a stable kernel branch. It also brings a new rescue= mount option and performance improvements to the Btrfs file system, support for NVIDIA Tegra210 external memory controllers, support for Intel Keem Bay Movidius VPUs, and improved anonymous memory management.
Linux 5.8 End Of Life: How To Upgrade To Linux 5.9
1. Switch to /tmp directory and wget all of these links one-by-one in the terminal.
wget -c https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.10-rc1/amd64/linux-headers-5.10.0-051000rc1_5.10.0-051000rc1.202010291359_all.deb
wget -c https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.10-rc1/amd64/linux-headers-5.10.0-051000rc1-generic_5.10.0-051000rc1.202010291359_amd64.deb
wget -c https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.10-rc1/amd64/linux-image-unsigned-5.10.0-051000rc1-generic_5.10.0-051000rc1.202010291359_amd64.deb
wget -c https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.10-rc1/amd64/linux-modules-5.10.0-051000rc1-generic_5.10.0-051000rc1.202010291359_amd64.deb
2. Now, to install new kernel enter the following command
sudo dpkg -i *.deb3. Reboot the system
sudo shutdown -r now4. After your computer reboots, update the packages list.
sudo apt-get update5. Upgrade Packages
sudo apt-get upgrade6. Check for the kernel version using the command
uname -rYou should now be running the latest Linux 5.9 LTS. Do let us know in the comments section below if you face issues during the installation.
