Linux 5.6-rc4 Kernel Released

The fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.6 is now available for testing.

Linux 5.6 final should be out by the end of March or first weekend of April but in the mean time 5.6-rc4 marks roughly the midway point for this first 2020 spring kernel update.

Linux 5.6 is a very exciting kernel with tons of new functionality for both end-users and developers. In terms of Linux 5.6-rc4, there has been a lot of bug/regression fixes over the past week.

Linus Torvalds wrote of 5.6-rc4, "Fairly reasonably sized rc4, and the diffstat looks nice and flat too (which basically means "lots of small changes") except for a netfilter ipset fix that ended up being somewhat big and involved due to locking changes. That single commit shows up in the dirstat too, and accounts for about 1/6th of the whole patch. Anyway, everything else looks fairly small. There's a couple of ethernet drivers that got a few bigger changes, but there really is a lot of small stuff all over: architectures (x86, arm64, risc-v), drivers (gpu, hid, networking), filesystems (zonefs and ext4), and some tracing code."

Also hitting Linux 5.6-rc4 this week and since back-ported is an Intel KVM virtualization security fix.