Linux 5.5-rc7 Kernel Released

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 19 January 2020 at 07:27 PM EST. 27 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
The seventh weekly release candidate to Linux 5.5 is now available for testing.

Linus noted with Linux 5.5-rc7 there was a large uptick in patch volume at week's end. "Well, things picked up at the end of the week, with half of my merges happening in the last two days."

Due to the recent holidays in large part, it's possible an eighth release candidate may be needed for Linux 5.5 before then releasing the kernel as stable on 2 February. However, in today's 5.5-rc7 announcement, Torvalds noted he may just end up releasing 5.5 stable next week. In any case, the release of Linux 5.5 is right on the horizon and this should be the kernel powering Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and other upcoming distribution releases.

Among the changes to find in Linux 5.5-rc7 is the Intel Gen9 graphics "iGPU Leak" mitigation (also since back-ported to stable series, fortunately the patch for these current Intel graphics is not regressing the performance like the older Gen7 patches), Intel PMC Core additions for Comet Lake, various Btrfs fixes, and various other bug/regression fixes throughout.

See our Linux 5.5 feature overview for a look at the plethora of changes and new features coming as this first major kernel release of 2020.
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