Linux 4.15-rc5 Released Early For Torvalds' Christmas Festivities

As an early Christmas gift for those wanting to do some kernel testing this weekend, Linus Torvalds has done the release of Linux 4.15-rc5 a little bit early.

Linus Torvalds explained in the release announcement he ended up releasing 4.15-rc5 early due to Christmas Eve being the "big day" per European traditions and the day after for recovery. So now 4.15-rc5 is out there and overall he's happy with the relatively light code churn for the week.

"This (shortened) week ended up being fairly normal for rc5, with the exception of the ongoing merging of the x86 low-level prep for kernel page table isolation that continues and is noticeable. In fact, about a third of the rc5 patch is x86 updates due to that. It all looks like very good cleanups, though, and it's been through about two hundred iterations by now (no, seriously, Thomas has been keeping track of his iterative updates of the PTI series, and it apparently hit 196 in the last two months)," Torvalds explained.

You can read his brief release announcement on the kernel mailing list.

Linux 4.15 should be out around mid-January and you can see our 4.15 kernel feature overview if you are behind on your reading and want to find out what's coming with this first stable kernel release of 2018.