Linux 5.9-rc4 Kernel Released

Linus Torvalds took some time out of his US Labor Day weekend to issue the fourth weekly release candidate of the Linux 5.9 kernel.

Even with the US holiday kicking off at the weekend, Linux 5.9-rc4 ticked up in activity but that is in part because 5.9-rc3 was smaller than normal due to timing of pull requests.

Linus noted in today's 5.9-rc4 announcement, "rc4 has all the pieces that were missing from rc3, and is larger than usual. It's not outrageously so, and we've had bigger rc4's, so it while it's a bit larger than average, it's all well within the normal range, and not something I'll lose any sleep over. We've got changes all over, with the expected networking fixes perhaps standing out, but there's all the usual suspects: drivers (sound, nvme, gpu, iommu, mmc etc), filesystems (btrfs, afs, affs(!) and xfs), architecture updates (a little bit of this, a little bit of that) and documentation and tooling (mainly perf). Plus misc core noise, mainly mm."

He went on to say in the rc4 announcement, "most of it looks pretty small, with a couple of bigger blips in the diffstat (intel pstate cpufreq driver, mac802.11 data rates, xen memory allocation helpers). But even those blips aren't exactly huge, they just end up standing out by being more than a few handfuls of lines of change. So I certainly can't claim that things have calmed down, but hopefully this was pretty much it. Knock wood."

See our Linux 5.9 feature overview to learn more about this big kernel update. The stable Linux 5.9 release should happen in early to mid October depending upon how the cycle plays out.