Linux 5.5-rc6 Released With Some Notable Radeon Graphics Fixes Plus Other Random Work

Linus Torvalds has just issued Linux 5.5-rc6 as the latest test release ahead of the stable Linux 5.5 kernel due out in a few weeks.

Linus noted that while the holidays have passed, Linux 5.5-rc6 is still fairly light on changes and calmer than normal for this stage of development. But considering everything, he thinks there may be eight release candidates before going gold due to the holiday downtime. Should this cycle stretch out to eight release candidates, it would place the stable Linux 5.5 release (and opening of Linux 5.6's merge window) the first weekend of February.

Linus commented, "Anyway, rc6 is dominated mostly by drivers. There's a little bit of everything there: networking perhaps stands out, but there's USB, GPU, HID, MTD, sound, gpio, block and misc other driver updates there. Outside of drivers, there's core networking, some minor arch updates (ARC, RISC-V, one arm64 revert), some tracing fixes, and a set of fixes for the clone3() system call"

While getting late into the release cycle with big ticket bugs getting checked off the list, this week there were some notable graphics driver fixes. In particular, these prominent AMDGPU fixes pertaining to high resolution outputs, Raven APUs, and enabling synchronization object timeline support as needed by Vulkan. On the Intel side is also some fixes for newer hardware from Icelake to Elkhart Lake.

See the list of Linux 5.5 features/changes to learn about what's coming for this stable release due out around the end of January / early February.