The new 5.14 kernel update of Linux will come out on Sunday, August 29th. It will be a big step for enterprise and cloud applications in the coming months. The new update will feature improved security and performance features.
Enterprise and cloud users always look for enhanced security. The new Linux 5.14 will provide them with the same. Vice president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, Mike McGrath said that the core scheduling feature added in the new update will help in lower processor-level threats like Spectre and Meltdown. These vulnerabilities were first identified in 2018. Earlier Linux users used methods like turning off hyper-threading on CPUs to overcome these vulnerabilities. Core scheduling will help to classify trusted and untrusted tasks so that they will be separated. This will restrain the overall impact of the threat and keeps the cloud-scale performance intact.
Another security feature added in Linux 5.14 kernel update is memfd_secret (). It will make a memory range that cannot be accessed by anyone including the kernel. It will prevent attacks that target memory and exploit it. This memory range will store “cryptographic keys, sensitive data, and other secrets” so that access to it will be limited to others or the system itself. Linux kernel can be called the center of the open-source Linux operating system. It provides the main functionality for system operations.
The Linux 5.14 kernel takes the help of several contributors and went through seven release candidates in the last two months. The developers who contributed to it include Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and Samsung. One important individual contributor is the Red Hat business unit which was acquired by IBM, in 2019.
McGrath is sure of the immense capabilities of Linux 5.14. it will be released soon but it might take some time before it will be incorporated into enterprise releases. It will initially be associated with Red Hat’s Fedora community Linux distribution. It has also been notified that the Linux vendor SUSE will bring out Linux 5.14 within days after its release to its openSUSE Tumbleweed community release. The company’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 will also have the 5.14 kernel.
Linux now also is a pathbreaking addition to the open-source operating system as it was 30 years ago. It has made many efforts over the past 30 years to transform the infrastructure of the internet. It has become an essential part of the cloud. Red Hat is also happy that Linux is powering the edge computing processes on large scale. It will now be expanded over several new fields.
