Linux 5.7-rc4 Released As A Pleasantly Calm Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.7-rc4 Released As A Pleasantly Calm Kernel

Linus Torvalds just announced the Linux 5.7-rc4 kernel release is up for testing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.7-rc4-Kernel

[lucrus]

Linus release announcements are slowly becoming boring. He can't really tell if a kernel is better or worse based on number of commits: only people testing it can tell. I don't know if he's having fun making up random comments or if he really thinks those comment are useful to anyone.

if I were him, I'd just say nothing, at least in these cases when there is nothing to say. Granted, I'm not him and there must be a reason.

[kcrudup]

He can't really tell if a kernel is better or worse based on number of commits: only people testing it can tell.

FWIW I pull Linus' master branch pretty much daily and if I get a regression, I'll let the Maintainer know as soon as I've been able to bisect the cause; I imagine I'm not the only one doing so, so there's probably at least a little bit of "QA" going on.

[zerothruster]

FWIW I pull Linus' master branch pretty much daily and if I get a regression, I'll let the Maintainer know as soon as I've been able to bisect the cause; I imagine I'm not the only one doing so, so there's probably at least a little bit of "QA" going on.

Sure, and all the QA (and similarly on the attempts to keep 'stable' up to date) are great. But linux runs on so many platforms, and on so many different .configs that people _here_ are likely to care about, that what fixes issues for some people can easily cause issues for others. For that, the rest of us have to hope that someone doing the testing has found any issues that might affect us.

So, please keep testing. I'll hope to try rc4 on more of my machines this week, if I can fit it in. rc1 seemed ok for about a week on one ryzen, but then kept dieing without any information - but that has been normal for that machine at times, so I reverted to 5.6.2 to get things done. On my haswell rc2 has seemed ok, but without a lot of use. Saw reports of apparent amdgpu issues in the past week or so, which caused me not to try on my Picasso (which anyway has always dumped from the amdgpu codeduring boot, without apparent problems afterwards and without any repsonses when I asked), and that is currently doing important things. Fitting in the testing is hard!

[gregzeng]

So much exciting vaporware is about version 5.8, so 5.7 should be calming & boring, in comparison.
"The Linus Foundation" needs a marketing section, to highlight the remarkable features of each major edition. Instead we are drip fed some changes with each RC or each bug-fix. For instance, we were promised a no-boot required, when kernel upgrades are made, some time ago. Is this still ok?
Some kernel versions have important optimizations & power for different hardware items. Only close reading of the changes shows this. Not good enough!

[kcrudup]

So, please keep testing!

I will! I have an IceLake laptop that gets a little more/better functionality each week, Power Management especially, so I keep "git fetch --all"'ing (I have several devs' repos in my kernel tree) and testing what comes thru. I've reported a handful of fixes too, so in my own little way I'm helping overall.

[numasan]

So much exciting vaporware is about version 5.8, so 5.7 should be calming & boring, in comparison.
"The Linus Foundation" needs a marketing section, to highlight the remarkable features of each major edition. Instead we are drip fed some changes with each RC or each bug-fix. For instance, we were promised a no-boot required, when kernel upgrades are made, some time ago. Is this still ok?
Some kernel versions have important optimizations & power for different hardware items. Only close reading of the changes shows this. Not good enough!

https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges highlights features of every major kernel release.

kcrudup Thanks for testing and reporting! I'm not skilled enough to participate (yet).