Linux Kernel 5.1 has been officially released

In an email to the Linux Kernel mailing list on Sunday, Linus has officially released the next version of the Linux kernel. Kudos to everybody spending their time working on making the core of all Linux systems better for everybody.

Support for AMDs new line of laptop CPUs with integrated GPUs has been a bit of issue on Linux, especially with regards to power usage. The kernel update has several commits for BACO, which is system to allow some of the GPU to be shut off when it's not needed. This should hopefully provide some power saving for users of AMD laptops. There was also a small change to the open source nouveau driver for Pascal based Nvidia GPUs, but nothing major.

One other update that may provide some power saving benefit is a new cpuidle governor. You may be familiar with other CPU governors (like performance or powersave) that manage the CPUs clock speed. However, the idle governor decides when the CPU should be put into a very low power mode. A new governor called TEO has been introduced alongside the existing ones and may provide some benefit, although it's not entirely clear to what extent. I'll be interested to see some proper testing if it will actually provide any decrease in power usage for users.

Some more work has also been done toward the 'Year 2038' problem. For those that don't know, traditionally Linux has stored the current time, in seconds, since 1970 in a 32-bit integer and by the year 2038 this integer would overflow. To combat this issue a lot of work has been done to transition over to using a 64-bit integer, even on 32-bit systems. This will ensure no catastrophic issues in the next 20 years.

See the full list of changes here.