Linux 5.4 kernel officially released with support for exFAT and AMD’s GPUs

Linux 5.4 “Kleptomaniac Octopus” finally released after eight RC candidate versions since the beginning of October. Now it is finally here with a lot of new features, enhanced security, and updated hardware drivers. The biggest highlight of the Linux 5.4 kernel is it finally supports Microsoft’s exFAT file format, which can better use portable storage devices such as USB flash drives and mobile hard disks.

The new version also adds kernel locking (Kernel Lockdown), which is part of the Linux security module. A new layer of protection is added to the kernel to restrict access to the system kernel by specific programs and to avoid malicious code intrusion.

Major highlights on the hardware side, adding support for AMD Navi 12/14 GPU core (RX 5000 series graphics card), Radeon Arcturus GPU core (generation of the next generation core of Arcturus) and AMD Dali APU (next-generation ultra-low power).

Other key updates include:

• Support for Intel Tiger Lake processor (next-generation 10nm++ platform.
• Support for Intel Lightning Mountain SoC processor (14nm Atom new product).
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC processor support included.
• Improved Android App memory management.
• New High-performance virtio driver, virtio-fs (for file sharing), new file integrity security check function fs-verity, new device real-time cloning function dm-clone.

The work on Linux 5.5 already began and would launch 2020 in late January, however, Linus Torvalds said that it will soon be Thanksgiving and his three children will return home, so the development progress may be delayed by one or two weeks. However, till then you can download Linux 5.4 Kernal via https://www.kernel.org/