Linux 5.5 Released With Many Hardware Support Improvements

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.5 as stable.

While there was an uptick in patches this week and some concern the Linux 5.5 cycle may be extended due to the downtime encountered around the Christmas and New Year's holidays, Linus did opt today to release the 5.5 kernel on schedule today rather than going for an extra release candidate.

Linux 5.5 brings many changes including Raspberry Pi 4 support, AMD Navi GPU overclocking, support for new and upcoming Intel platforms, enabling 5-level paging by default, an NVMe drive temperature driver that is convenient and better than the current user-space utilities, Chromebook Wake-On-Voice support, KUnit for in-kernel unit testing, and much more. See our Linux 5.5 feature overview to learn more about all the changes for this first big kernel release of 2020.

Looking ahead, now the Linux 5.6 merge window is open. Linux 5.6 is looking to be a spectacular release with changes ranging from adding WireGuard, initial USB4 support, networking improvements, lots of new hardware bits, and more as outlined earlier today. Linux 5.6 in turn should be out in April but too close for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and thus this upcoming Ubuntu Linux release will almost certainly be based off a 5.5-based kernel.

Torvalds has the Linux 5.5 codename under the title of the "Kleptomaniac Octopus." His brief release announcement can be read on lore.kernel.org.