Linux Torvalds has announced availability of Linux kernel 5.13 release candidate that adds preliminary support for Apple's M1 system-on-chip along with a number of improvements to the operating system itself, reports 9to5Linux.com .

The most interesting addition to Linux kernel 5.13 is preliminary support for Apple's M1 SoC, something that developers have been working on for months now . While Linux does support Arm and can run on various SoCs such as the Raspberry Pi , Apple's M1 is considerably different from other processors, so making Linux run on this chip was a tough challenge .

At this point Linux 5.13-RC1 can boot on an M1-based system, but does not support all features of the SoC. For example, GPU support is still not even half-baked.

"This is just basic bring-up, but it lays a solid foundation and is probably the most challenging up-streaming step we'll have to do, at lease until the GPU stuff is done," said Hector Martin, a software developer, reports The Register .

Availability of Linux kernel 5.13-RC1 means that the Linux development community finds that the new build is almost ready for release, with an anticipated final release due in June / July.

"This was – as expected – a fairly big merge window, but things seem to have proceeded fairly smoothly," wrote Torvalds in a description of the new Linux kernel version. "There's a lot in there. […] It's all over the place, although GPU and networking stands out. […] Outside of drivers, it's a bit of everything: arch updates (Arm, x86 and PowerPC dominate), documentation, tooling,  and obviously all the expected core kernel stuff: file systems, process handling, VM, and core networking."

In addition to Apple's M1, the new Linux kernel 5.13-RC1 features improved support for Arm's Zen 3 microarchitecture, the latest Arm-based SoCs for servers, and the RISC-V architecture.