Linux 5.2-rc1 Kernel Released With Case-Insensitive EXT4, New Intel HW & RTW88 WiFi

Back when Linux 5.1 was released, Linus Torvalds expressed some concern that the Linux 5.2 merge window may have to be extended by a few days as it would conflict with his daughter's graduation, but he has managed still to get 5.2-rc1 out on time.

After the two-week-long merge window, Linus Torvalds just tagged 5.2-rc1 as the first test release for the mighty impressive Linux 5.2 kernel.

In case you missed it, this morning we published our Linux 5.2 feature overview. Linux 5.2 notably introduces optional case-insensitive EXT4 file-system support on a per-directory basis, production-ready Intel Icelake graphics support and a number of other Intel hardware additions from Comet Lake prepping to Agilex FPGA support, Realtek RTW88 as a new WiFi driver replacing the RTLWIFI driver, deprecation of the legacy IDE driver, better AMD Ryzen laptop support, new ARM open-source graphics drivers, new subsystems, and more. Hit up that article for all the prominent details on Linux 5.2, which is shaping up to be a major release.

Torvalds noted in the 5.2-rc1 post:

Things look fairly normal. Just about two thirds of the patch is drivers (all over), with the bulk of the rest being arch updates, tooling, documentation and vfs/filesystem updates, of which there were more than usual (the unicode tables for ext4 case insensitivity do end up being a big part of the "bulk" side).

But there's core networking, kernel and vm changes too - it's just that the other areas tend to simply be much bulkier. Drivers etc tend to just have a ton more lines to them, if only by virtue of there being so many of them (although admittedly also sometimes because some drivers tend to just be very verbose and have a lot of register definitions etc).

Size-wise things look fairly normal. 12k+ commits (plus another ~750 merge commits) is about normal for us by now. And hard to summarize in a release email.

There are several Linux 5.2 changes on the performance front and tonight already I'm building Linux 5.2-rc1 right now to begin some benchmarking. Expect the first of our preliminary Linux 5.2 kernel benchmarks over the days ahead.