Linux 5.0 released this week, with its headlining features being the addition of FreeSync support and Spectre vulnerability fixes.
Still, this is a start, and Linux 5.0 users interested in enabling FreeSync should check out Phoronix's guide to doing so. The setup requires all the appropriate hardware--a FreeSync compatible monitor and graphics card--as well as an assortment of drivers.
Linux 5.0 also includes Spectre mitigations that are supposed to defend against the popular side-channel attack without incurring serious performance hits. A previous kernel release (4.20) incurred up to a 50 percent performance penalty on some Intel processors.
Phoronix tested the new kernel's performance and found the penalty varies by CPU. It saw a 13 percent hit on an Intel Core i9-7980XE, a 14 percent hit on an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and a 17 percent hit on an Intel Core i7-8086K, based on the geometric mean of all tests.
Those numbers are unlikely to make people happy. Anyone who buys a CPU won't be pleased to find out securing it results in a double-digit performance drop. Still, a 17 percent performance decline is better than a 50 percent one.
There are many other features in the Linux 5.0 release. But Linus Torvalds, principal developer of the Linux kernel, noted that this isn't why it's a full point release.
"The overall changes for all of the 5.0 release are much bigger," he said in a message about the release. "But I'd like to point out (yet again) that we don't do feature-based releases and that '5.0' doesn't mean anything more than that the 4.x numbers started getting big enough that I ran out of fingers and toes."
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