Linux 5.4-rc2 Released As The "Nesting Opossum"

Linus Torvalds is back on his Sunday release regiment with having just declared the Linux 5.4-rc2 test release and also took the opportunity to have some fun by shifting the kernel's codename to be the Nesting Opossum, replacing the Bobtail Squid.

As for this release candidate now one week past the Linux 5.4 merge window / feature cut-off, it's been a busy week of fixes. One set of "fixes" that does interest us is the Friday pull of DRM fixes that included enabling AMDGPU bulk moves for a performance gain across various graphics and compute workloads.

As for Linus' traditional commentary, he noted, "Nothing particularly stands out here. It's roughly one third arch updates, one third drivers, and one third "misc" (kvm selftests, networking, filesystems, core kernel, header files etc). No real theme, just random fixes all over the place. The diffstat is pretty flat too, which is just another sign of "small fixes all over". So nothing looks particularly worrisome, but usually rc2 is fairly calm and it takes a while for any regressions to be noticed. And this one was one of the nice small rc2's (5.2 and 5.3 rc2's were both larger than usual), but maybe it's because it was also a day shorter."

See our Linux 5.4 feature overview if not already up to speed on all of the changes and new features of this kernel, which should debut as stable towards the end of November.