Linux 5.9 Stable Expected In Two Weeks, But For Now Is Linux 5.9-rc7

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.9-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for Linux 5.9. Due to the regressions encountered this cycle and prominent issues being resolved late, he's looking at releasing Linux 5.9 in two weeks time rather than next week.

Linus began the 5.9-rc7 announcement with, "So we finally have all the issues I know about sorted out - the fix for the VM issue I mentioned in the rc6 announcement is here, as is the fix for the slab corruption issue that was separately discussed, along with another silly page locking bug one-liner fix. But while I do now know of any remaining gating issues any more, the fixes came in fairly late. So unless I feel insanely optimistic and/or a burning bush tells me that everything is bug-free, my plan right now is that I'll do another rc next Sunday rather than the final 5.9 release. And btw, please no more burning bushes. We're kind of sensitive about those on the West coast right now."

In the 5.9-rc7 announcement he also notes that most of the fixes this week are on the driver and networking side.

See our Linux 5.9 feature overview to learn more about this autumn 2020 kernel update. Sadly though this release is too late for seeing it in Ubuntu 20.10 and for Fedora 33 should be coming down just as a stable release update later on.