Linus Torvalds and the team developing the Linux kernel have had a quiet week, too much I would say. They are probably getting lucky and everything is going too well for them, but yesterday they released Linux 5.3-rc5 and this week's email It is more like what they would post on a XNUMXth Release Candidate than what they would post on another XNUMXth rc: few changes and most very small.
Torvalds only highlights two points this week: one related to the noise in VM and the rest is distributed between the usual changes, which are usually driver corrections (usb, sound, nvme, habanalabs, rdma ...), architecture updates (arm64 and x86) and file system corrections (afs and btrfs). As we say, a very quiet fifth week, but that does not mean that it cannot happen like in Linux 5.2, that there were several quiet weeks until in the sixth, everything got out of control and the size increased more than it should within two weeks of the official launch.
Linux 5.3 is coming in mid-September
Another week, another -rc. It's been quiet and nothing stands out, except maybe some of the VM noises where we had to un-roll back some node-local wrt changes against huge page allocations. The rest are the usual driver patches (usb, sound, nvme, habanalabs, rdma ...), some architecture updates (arm64 and x86) along with some file system fixes (afs and btrfs). But all of this is quite small.
If there are no surprises, Linux 5.3 will be released in the second half of September, about a month from now. Torvalds usually releases 7-8 Release Candidates before the official release, so the landing of the next major Linux kernel update could occur on September 15 if no stones are found on the way or 22 if they have to throw another CR.
You have a list with the most outstanding news that will arrive with Linux 5.3 in this link.