Linux 5.4-rc6 Released With Network Changes Ticking High

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.4-rc6 back on schedule after his travels this past week around the Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France.

While we are getting late into the Linux 5.4 cycle, the bug/regression fixing is unfortunately not settling down. There still is a lot of churn with Torvalds calling particular attention to the networking subsystem where about half the changes this past week reside. Though with there not having been any networking fixes for last week's 5.4-rc5, networking being the outlier this week isn't too surprising.

Torvalds commented in the RC6 announcement, "There's no particular area or outstanding issue that is worrisome, but if things don't calm down this week, I suspect we'll be looking at one of those releases when we have an rc8. We'll see how things evolve here over the next couple of weeks."

If indeed eight release candidates are warranted, that will push out the Linux 5.4 stable release to 24 November rather than 17 November if it were just going through seven RCs.

See our Linux 5.4 feature overview to learn more about this big upcoming kernel release.