Linux 5.16-rc4 Released - "Nothing Looks All That Scary"

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate for Linux 5.16 that will debut as stable in early 2022.

While Linux 5.16-rc3 was lighter due to Thanksgiving activities by US developers, Linux 5.16-rc4 is still trending on the small side. Linus Torvalds noted in today's release announcement, "Fairly small rc4 this week. Three areas stand out in the diff: some kvm fixes (and tests), network driver fixes, and the tegra SoC sound fixes."

Torvalds went on to add in today's 5.16-rc4 announcement, "The rest is fairly spread out: drm fixes, some filesystem stuff, various arch updates, and some smattering of random driver fixes. Nothing looks all that scary, although I certainly hope the kvm side will calm down."

It's mostly the usual bug fixing found in this week's release candidate. Coming a bit notable are some Spectre V1 fixes for some regressions introduced last year in that handling around SWAPGS.

Linux 5.16 is just a few weeks out from release.

See our Linux 5.16 feature overview to learn more about all the shiny, exciting features coming in this first Linux kernel release of 2022.