Linux 5.13-rc5 Is Fairly Average In Size But Not Calming Down Yet

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.13-rc5 ahead of Linux 5.13 potentially releasing later this month but depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out could end up in early July.

Linux 5.13 has been fairly busy with changes and Torvalds noted in today's announcement that while this -rc5 is "fairly average" in size, the cycle hasn't yet calmed down. He's hoping now that as we move towards 5.13-rc6 that things will settle down.

Of this week's changes, Linus wrote in the 5.13-rc5 announcement, "Networking (both drivers and core networking code) is once again responsible for a fairly big chunk of the fixes in rc5, but there's certainly a fair number of fixes elsewhere to - architectures (arm64 has mostly devicetree updates, but we've got fixes to x86, mips, powerpc in there too), other drivers (GPU driver fixes stand out, but there's also sound, HID, scsi, nvme.. you name it). And we have a scattering of fixes elsewhere too: filesystems (btrfs, ext4, gfs2, ocfs, fanotify), soem core vm fixes, and some selftest and perf tool updates."

Some items that I was tracking on and reported about this week was the x86/x86_64 kernel now always reserving the first 1MB of RAM unconditionally to workaround some pesky issues. Also, Intel ENQCMD/ENQCMDS getting disabled by the kernel until its software code can be properly fixed up. There is also the change in 5.13-rc5 of the "-O3" optimization for WireGuard being disabled over that aggressive optimization level being considered too unsafe for the kernel.

See my Linux 5.13 feature list to learn more about the changes at large coming for this stable kernel release in a few weeks.