Linux 5.5-rc2 Kernel Released

On schedule with one week since the closure of the Linux 5.5 kernel merge window and subsequent release candidate, Linux 5.5-rc2 is out this evening for testing.

Linux 5.5 is going to be a grand kernel release that will ultimately ship around the end of January. As covered in our Linux 5.5 feature overview there are many interesting changes in tow: support for the Raspberry Pi 4 / BCM2711, various performance changes still being explored, support for reporting NVMe drive temperatures, a new Logitech keyboard driver, AMD HDCP support for content protection, wake-on-voice support from Chromebooks, the introduction of KUnit for unit testing the kernel, new RAID1 modes that are quite exciting for Btrfs, and much more. (See that feature overview for the more thorough listing.)

Since Linux 5.5-rc1, the RC2 kernel introduces a fair number of fixes that landed particularly later in the week. Linus noted in today's brief 5.5-rc2 announcement, "Things look normal - rc2 is usually fairly calm, and so it was this week too. All the stats look normal too - the bulk of this is drivers (gpu, rdma, networking, scsi, usb stand out, but there's noise elsewhere too), with the rest being random things all over - io_uring, filesystems (ceph, overlayfs), core networking, arch updates, header files, etc etc. So peeps - go build it, install it and boot it, and report back any problems you see,"

More Linux 5.5 kernel benchmarking will be happening shortly at Phoronix, which should be interesting considering some wild swings in performance saw during the merge window and will be interesting to see how the new changes are stabilizing.