Linux 5.9-rc8 Released To Provide An Extra Week Of Testing

While normally the Linux kernel sees its stable releases after about seven weeks worth of release candidates, today Linux 5.9-rc8 was issued in allowing an extra week of testing.

Following that page lock unfairness performance regression and other issues this cycle as well as more changes than usual late in the cycle, as expected Linus Torvalds today issued Linux 5.9-rc8 rather than going straight to Linux 5.9 stable. In turn this means the Linux 5.9 official release will happen next weekend on 11 October.

Torvalds wrote in the -rc8 announcement, "So things have been pretty calm, and rc8 is fairly small. I'm still waiting for a networking pull with some fixes, so it's not like I could have made a final 5.9 release even if I had wanted to, but there was nothing scary going on this past week, and it all feels ready for a final 5.9 next weekend...Anyway, the changes in rc8 are mostly driver fixlets, with some AMD GPU header file updates being a fairly noticeable part of the patch. That's not some scary big change - it' just the usual register definition update (and much smaller than the wholesale big ones we've had). Outside of the driver stuff, we do have a few filesystem fixes (btrfs and nfs), and a couple of core fixes (tiny fallout from the VM changes, but also a pipe splice race fixlet for stable and a couple of epoll fixes)."

There are many changes to get excited about with Linux 5.9 come its debut next week. After that, onward to another interesting cycle with Linux 5.10 for release around year's end.