Linux 5.9 rc4 Released
Linus Torvalds thinks the fourth Linux 5.9 release candidate was "bigger" than usual. He may be referring to a single commit titled "Pull tasklet API conversions" with 266761 lines removed and 713638 lines added to 12723 different files. The rest of the changes since rc3 are mostly smaller trivial fixes.
written by 윤채경 (Yoon Chae-kyung) 2020-09-07 - last edited 2020-09-07. © CC BY
Linux 5.9 rc4.
Linus Torvalds had this to say about the Linux 5.9 rc4 release:
"Hey, last weekend I said that rc3 was fairly small, and it was likely due to the usual timing fluctuations in pull requests. And guess what? Here we are, a week later, and yup - 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.
But 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.
Go test. Pretty please."
September 6th, 2020
Linus has not changed the kernels NAME in the Makefile since Linux 5.6. 5.9 rc4 is, therefore, still named "Kleptomaniac Octopus".
The linus.git commit log has nothing huge standing out apart from one commit named "Pull tasklet API conversions". That one commit by Takashi Iwai from SUSE Linux adds a total of 713638 lines and removes a total of 266761 lines from 12723 different files. Linux 5.9 rc4 compiles and boots and it appears to work just fine (can so far only confirm that it boots and works for 10 minutes).
Linux 5.9 rc4 is, like all new kernel releases, available from www.kernel.org. You can also git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git if you enjoy bleeding edge kernels.
See Linux 5.9 rc1 Is Released With Support for Upcoming AMD GPUs and Corsair RGB Hubs for an overview of the new features in Linux 5.9 (they are always added during the merge window before rc1, the release-cycle is all about small bug-fixes).
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