Linux 5.3-rc1 Debuts As "A Pretty Big Release"

Just as expected, Linus Torvalds this afternoon issued the first release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.3 kernel.

It's just not us that have been quite eager for Linux 5.3 and its changes. Torvalds acknowledged in the 5.3-rc1 announcement that this kernel is indeed a big one: "This is a pretty big release, judging by the commit count. Not the biggest ever (that honor still goes to 4.9-rc1, which was exceptionally big), and we've had a couple of comparable ones (4.12, 4.15 and 4.19 were also big merge windows), but it's definitely up there."

Linus also added in the announcement, "Anyway, despite the rocky start, and the big size, things mostly smoothed out towards the end of the merge window. And there's a lot to like in 5.3. Too much to do the shortlog with individual commits, of course, so appended is the usual "mergelog" of people I merged from and a one-liner very high-level "what got merged". For more detail, you should go check the git tree."

If you don't want to parse the logs and Git tree yourself, see our original Linux 5.3 feature overview to learn about what's new. Benchmarks of Linux 5.3 Git will be forthcoming on Phoronix.