Linux 5.4-rc3 Released Ahead Of Official Kernel Debut In November

Linus Torvalds has just issued the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.4 kernel that should debut as stable before the end of November.

In his release announcement, Linus Torvalds commented of Linux 5.4-rc3, "Things continue to look fairly normal, with rc3 being larger than rc2, as people are starting to find more regressions, but 5.4 so far remains on the smaller side of recent releases. The diffstat looks fairly flat too, although we had a couple of staging drivers being removed here that show up as spikes. Drivers in general account for about two thirds of the diff, and it's not just those staging drivers, it's other small noise all over the place: usb, drm, iio, rdma.."

See our Linux 5.4 feature overview if not aware of the wide range of kernel changes that span this cycle from Microsoft exFAT support through a lot of new graphics hardware support to other hardware support additions.

Linux 5.4 is shaping up to be a great kernel to end out 2019 while Linux 5.5 will open following that but not debut as stable until well into Q1'2020.

More Linux 5.4 kernel benchmarks are forthcoming on Phoronix.