Linux 5.10-rc5 Released And It's Still Seeing Too Much Churn
With Linux 5.10-rc5 it's more bug fixing as usual for getting into the late stage of the cycle. But there are some additional changes this week to also note: AMD "Arcturus" GPU support is no longer experimental and the first product launched in the form of the AMD Instinct MI100, there is a regression fix for stress-ng that was causing as much as a 70% drop, and the POWER9 L1d cache flushing security change is in place for Linux 5.10 as well as the stable Linux series.
But overall the rate of changes for Linux 5.10-rc5 is quite high and much higher than it normally is five weeks past the merge window... Linus Torvalds noted in the release announcement, "The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big, even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm down and shrink. There's nothing in here that makes me particularly nervous, but in pure numbers of commits, this is the largest rc5 we've had in the 5.x series. Number of diff lines too, for that matter. And I can't even claim that it's because previous rc's have been small and missing stuff and we were just catching up. Anyway, changes all over, and apart from it being a bit more than I'd like, it all looks fairly normal...We'll have to see how this release shapes up, but I'm still hopeful for things to calm down. Otherwise we get into uncomfortable territory for the next release with the holiday season coming up too."
If all goes well, Linux 5.10 final will be out before or around mid-December, followed by the Linux 5.11 merge window to end out this nasty year that is 2020. See our Linux 5.10 feature overview to learn about all of the changes of this big kernel update.
1 Comment
