Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/887679/

Linus has released the 5.17 kernel.

So we had an extra week of at the end of this release cycle, and
I’m happy to report that it was very calm indeed. We could
probably have skipped it with not a lot of downside, but we did get
a few last-minute reverts and fixes in and avoid some brown-paper
bugs that would otherwise have been stable fodder, so it’s all good

Some of the significant features in this release include
KCSAN
support for the arm64 architecture,
the bpf_loop() helper,
ID-mapped filesystem mounts,
the reference-count tracking
infrastructure,
a switch to BLAKE2s for the random-number generator,
a rewritten
network filesystem caching layer,
straight-line speculation mitigation,
and more.
See the LWN merge-window summaries
(part 1,
part 2) and
the KernelNewbies 5.17
page for more details.