Today, Linux Kernel 5.8 series has reached the end of life (EOL). Through the 5.8.18 point release declared earlier by famous kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Linux 5.8 Kernel series release on August 2nd, 2020, was regarded as one of the huge releases of all time by Linux Torvalds. With Linux 5.8 Kernel several new features and improvements were brought in. This included
support for LZO-RLE compression in the F2FS file system, inline encryption support for the block layer, a new faccessat2() system call, a new initrdmem= boot option for defining a primary RAM disk image, and new CAP_PERFMON functionality.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, Renowned Kernel Maintainer in a post stated,
This is the final 5.8.y release to be built, this branch is now end-of-life. Please upgrade to the 5.9.y kernel branch at this point.
The 5.8 Kernel also brought in Shadow Call Stack support for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture and Branch Target Identification (BTI) support for ARMv8.5. Mitigations for the Special Register Buffer Data Sampling (SRBDS) also called CrossTalk hardware vulnerability impacting some specific Intel CPUs, alongside a brand new mechanism for withdrawing mappings in /dev/mem while a device driver overcomes an overlapping memory range.
In June 2020 Linux Torvalds stated that Linux Kernel 5.7 is now ready for download.
As Linux Kernel 5.8 was not a long-term supported branch, it will no longer obtain additional updates that direct crucial bugs and security issues. If you are not using LTS kernels, we advise you to update to Linux kernel 5.9 or shift to a distro that’s utilizing it as early as possible.
Linux Kernel 5.9 released on October 11th, is the latest stable kernel series at the moment. It introduces support for the x86 FSGSBASE instructions, support for building x86 kernels, inline encryption support for the EXT4 and F2FS filesystems, and support for Chrome OS embedded-controller regulators.
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