What 2020 left Linux

The year 2020 will undoubtedly be a year that will leave its mark in history and not only in relation to all the events caused in the economy due to the pandemic caused by the Coronavirus (covid19), but also social movements, conflicts between nations, great natural events, among others.

And as for the world of technology, it is not far behind Well, throughout the past year many important things happened and many of them that left their mark.

That is why this time we share a compilation of the most important events of 2020 in Linux and open source.

Starting with Linux, throughout 2020 the following versions were released (without taking into account their corrective versions):

Linux 5.10 

Of its most outstanding features: support for the ARMv8.5 memory tagging extension, support for the SM2 digital signature algorithm, support for CAN ISO 15765 2: 2016 transport protocol, support for the IGMPv3 / MLDv2 multicast protocol, and support for Amazon Nitro enclaves. The EXT4 file system now comes with a "quick commit" mode that dramatically reduces the latency of multiple file operations.

Related article:
Linux 5.10 comes with significant Ext4 optimizations, improved AMD SEV compatibility, and more

Linux 5.9

In this version the limit the import of symbols from proprietary modules to GPL modules, schedule performance in deadline scheduler, improve dm-crypt performance, remove code for 32-bit Xen PV guests, new slab memory management mechanism, inline encryption support on ext4 and F2FS.

Related article:
The new version of Linux 5.9 has already been released and these are its news

Linux 5.8

Its novelties were: KCSAN race condition detector, universal mechanism to send notifications to the user space, hardware support for online encryption, extended protection mechanisms for ARM64, support for the Russian Baikal-T1 processor, the ability to mount procfs instances separately, implementation of Shadow Call Stack protection mechanisms for ARM64 and BTI.

Related article:
Linux 5.8: the largest version in the history of Linux has already been released

Linux 5.7

This version featured new implementation of FS exFAT, bareudp module for creating UDP tunnels, pointer authentication based protection for ARM64, the ability to attach BPF programs to LSM handlers, new implementation of Curve25519, split-lock detector, BPF compatibility with PREEMPT_RT, removal of restrictions on 80 character line size in code, taking into account CPU temperature indicators in task scheduler, memory write protection using userfaultfd.

linux tuxedo
Related article:
Linux 5.7: the new wonder is revealed

Linux 5.6

I arrive with the long-awaited WireGuard VPN interface integration, USB4 compatibility, namespaces for time, the ability to create TCP congestion handlers using BPF, initial MultiPath TCP support, 2038 kernel removal, "bootconfig" mechanism, ZoneFS FS.

Related article:
Linux 5.6 comes with WireGuard, USB 4.0, Arm EOPD support and more

Linux 5.5

The ability to assign aliases to network interfaces, the integration of cryptographic functions of the Zinc library, the ability to mirror on more than 2 disks in Btrfs RAID1, the mechanism for tracking the status of live patches, the kunit unit testing framework, improve the performance of the mac80211 wireless stack, the ability to access the root See section via SMB protocol, type verification in BPF.

linux tuxedo
Related article:
The new version of the Linux Kernel 5.5 has already been released and these are its news

In addition, we must not forget the movement towards an inclusive terminology in which the Linux kernel developers received the proposal and based on this a document was prepared in which the use of inclusive terminology is prescribed in the kernel. For identifiers used in the kernel, proposes to abandon the use of words like 'slave' and 'black list'.

Related article:
Linux and its developers analyze a transition to an inclusive language

And finally in terms of safety, in 2020 various local vulnerabilities became known They were not only the kernel, but also vulnerabilities that generally affected any GNU / Linux system and starting by mentioning a few we can find the vulnerability in the Linux kernel (AF_PACKET, BPF, vhost-net).

As well as vulnerabilities in sudo, systemd, Glibc (memcpy for ARMv7), F2FS fsck, GDM and the vulnerability in GRUB2 that allows UEFI secure boot to be bypassed.

Another one to talk about was one of the remote vulnerabilities on the qmail mail server and ZeroLogin in Samba.


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