Linux 5.4-rc5 Released As The "Kleptomaniac Octopus"

Linus Torvalds released the fifth weekly RC of Linux 5.4 a few hours early due to his travels around this week's Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France.

Linux 5.4-rc5 is now out with the latest bug/regression fixes for this kernel that will see its official debut in November. Besides the fixes, one change new to 5.4-rc5 is Xen 32-bit PV guest support officially being deprecated. The rest of this week's work is the usual smothering of fixes throughout the kernel.

Linus did write that 5.4-rc5 is bigger than recent kernel RC5 releases, but he isn't too worried. "unlike the previous rc's that were on the smaller side compared to recent releases, 5.4-rc5 is a bit _bigger_ than the rc5's of the last few releases. It's not huge, by any means, and partly exactly because previous rc's were small, I'm going to treat it as just some pent-up work going in, and I'm not worried. So things still seem pretty normal, and none of the patches look all that scary to me."

See our Linux 5.4 feature overview if not familiar with all of the changes for this forthcoming kernel update to end out 2019.

With Linux 5.4-rc5, Torvalds did have some fun in shifting the kernel codename from the Nesting Opossum to now being the Kleptomaniac Octopus.