Linux 5.8-rc1 Arrives As One Of The Biggest Releases Of All Time
Torvalds noted, "So I didn't really expect this, but 5.8 looks to be one of our biggest releases of all time. As of -rc1, it's right up there with v4.9, which has long been our biggest release by quite a bit in number of commits. Yes, 5.8-rc1 has a couple fewer commits than 4.9-rc1 did, but in many ways it's a much more comprehensive release despite that...5.8 is up there with the best, despite not really having any single thing that stands out. Yes, there's a couple of big driver changes (habanalabs and atomisp) that are certainly part of it, but it's not nearly as one-sided as some of the other historical big releases have been. The development is really all over the place: there's tons of fairly fundamental core work and cleanups, but there is also lots of filesystem work and obviously all the usual driver updates too. Plus documentation and architecture work."
Linus further explained in the announcement, "So in the 5.8 merge window we have modified about 20% of all the files in the kernel source repository. That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it _is_ scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development. IOW, 5.8 looks big. Really big. In pure numbers: over 14k non-merge commits (over 15k counting merges), ~800k new lines, and over 14 thousand files changed."
At least Torvalds recently switched to AMD Ryzen Threadripper for his main production system to help in speeding up kernel build times with this big kernel.
See our Linux 5.8 features list for an extensive look at the highlights of the kernel. Linux 5.8 stable should debut in early to mid August.
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