Linux Kernel 5.9 Released. This is What's New.

A new, stable Linux Kernel 5.9 is announced by Linus Torvalds. This kernel release is a big release in terms of hardware, graphics, and other performance updates.

Announced in the LKML, Linux Kernel 5.9 immediately available for download from the mainline Kernel builds.

The latest Linux Kernel 5.9 will be available via mainstream Linux distributions in early 2021 for those planned releases. For this year, most of the releases will feature Linux Kernel 5.8 such as Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla and Fedora 33.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in the Linux Kernel 5.9

Linux Kernel 5.9 New Features

The FSGSBASE support is complete with this kernel version. That means you get a heavy performance boost for AMD and Intel systems because this support helps to context switch in OS during heavy work without kernel interaction.
Toshiba USB 3.0 adapter and MCT USB 3.0 adapter support added.
Bunch of performance improvements for IBM Thinkpad series.
Radeon RX 6000 “RDNA ” graphics card and Intel Rocket Lake graphics card support.
The upcoming USB 4 specification gets more support as work is underway for full support eventually in future kernel versions.
More support for storage and file-system space. The Btrfs, F2FS seems performance improvements. More support is added for NVMe 2.0 spec for SSDs.
IBM POWER10 processor sees initial work for support.
Performance boost for ARM/ARM64 devices with optimized use of scheduler utilization information is added which is similar to Intel P-state push.
Bug fixes on race conditions, memory leaks across modules.

Changelog

For more details of changes visit this page.

Download

You can install the mainline kernel packages from the below link right now in your latest Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based derivatives. But it is not recommended to install this as it might break the current Ubuntu Linux system whichever you are running – 20.04 LTS or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

For general users, unless you are keen to experiment with the latest hardware whose support is added in this release, you should not update at the moment.

If you still want to install the latest Linux Kernel 5.9, follow the below instructions to install in Ubuntu based systems.

Visit the mainline kernel page.

There are two types of builds available – generic and lowlatency. For common systems, you can download generic builds that work most of the time. For audio recordings and other setups that require low latency, download the lowlatency one.

Download below three packages for generic via terminal and install.

cd /tmp

wget -c https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.9/amd64/linux-headers-5.9.0-050900-generic_5.9.0-050900.202010112230_amd64.deb
wget -c https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.9/amd64/linux-headers-5.9.0-050900_5.9.0-050900.202010112230_all.deb
wget -c https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.9/amd64/linux-image-unsigned-5.9.0-050900-generic_5.9.0-050900.202010112230_amd64.deb
wget -c https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.9/amd64/linux-modules-5.9.0-050900-generic_5.9.0-050900.202010112230_amd64.deb