The creator of Linux has made the latest kernel available, after what was one of the smoothest development processes in recent memory. Torvalds wrote in his weekly "State of the Kernel" post, "So we had quite the calm week since rc7, and I see no reason to delay 5.13.” Torvalds continued to say, "if the last week was small and calm, 5.13 overall is actually fairly large. In fact, it's one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers."

What can you expect in the 5.13 kernel? Some of the features that saw the most commits include Apple M1 support, early support for Wireless Wide Area Networks, Microsoft's Azure Network Adapter, Advanced Configuration and Power Interface spec for laptops, early work for Arm64 Hyper-V guests, RISK-V enhancements, support for Lenovo's Thinkpad X1 Tablet Thin Keyboard, support added for Apple's Magic Mouse 2, new drivers for Amazon's Luna game controller, support for AMD's NAVI GPU, and new virtio drivers for audio devices and Bluetooth controllers.

Although the 5.13 kernel is now available for downloading, you won't find it hitting the repositories for your distributions of choice for some time. For example, Ubuntu most likely won't see the 5.13 kernel appear until the 21.10 daily builds are released.