KERNEL WATCH
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so that you don’t have to.
L inus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.12. Among the new features is support for ID mapping in mounts, which means that users can change the apparent ownership of files on a permountpoint basis without having to use the chown command. This is useful for such use cases as shared files from a host into a container that has different users and permissions applied to the files. Another use case is the systemd-homed service which enables portable user home directories between machines with different users and groups configured.
With the release of 5.12 came the opening of the “merge window” (period of time during which disruptive changes are accepted) for what will be the 5.13 kernel. Among the many new features landing in 5.13 will be initial support for Apple Silicon M1 Macs running “bare metal” Linux (without a hypervisor), as well as support for the landlock LSM (Linux Security Module) that enables complex rules to be applied to the behaviour of the kernel for sand-boxed applications (the idea being to prevent certain dangerous or malicious types of behaviours).