Linux 5.8-rc4 Released Following A Calm Week

While last Sunday Linus Torvalds was concerned over a big Linux 5.8-rc3 release, this Sunday he is reporting that Linux 5.8-rc4 is on the smaller side.

Granted, there was the US Independence Day holiday on Saturday that may have interfered slightly with the patch flow, but overall Torvalds believes things to be settling down. He commented, "The end result is that it's been fairly calm, and there's certainly been discussion of upcoming fixes, but I still have the feeling that 5.8 is looking fairly normal and things are developing smoothly despite the size of this release."

As for the 5.8-rc4 material, Torvalds wrote in the rc4 announcement and is mostly just routine regression/bug fixes. One notable change this week is adding the Intel Assembly sources for the shaders mitigating iGPU Leak on Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics hardware, in order to satisfy the GNU Linux-libre folks.

Linux 5.8 should debut as stable in August. See our Linux 5.8 feature overview to learn more about this forthcoming kernel.