As expected by the weekly mail from seven days ago, Linus Torvalds has released this afternoon Linux 5.3-rc8. And is that the previous version, the seventh Release Candidate of the next installment of the Linux kernel, was larger than usual, in part because it arrived a day late, which gave the father of Linux time to attend a couple more requests. It was then that Torvalds said that it was mandatory to release an eighth Release Candidate that is already available.
Another reason why it has been launched this rc8 is that Torvalds is going to make several trips this week to attend the Linux Plumbers Conference and the Kernel Summit. The intention was to avoid opening the merge window of Linux 5.4 at a time when he would not be as focused as he should be because of the trips he has to make in the next seven days.
Linux 5.3-rc8, the latest Release Candidate before the stable version
And partly due to the extra week, we had some solutions that perhaps otherwise they would have been delayed and marked stable. EThe most notable (but hopefully not very noticeable) is fixing the race condition in configfs. That won't affect many people, with configfs is not that widely used, but Christoph and Al felt it it needed to be repaired.
Barring a surprise in the form of a setback, Linux 5.3 will be officially released on next September 15. It will be a version with many interesting news, as improved support for Apple MacBooks, initial support for Intel Speed Select technology on Cascadelake processors or that UBIFS now supports compression of the Zstd file system. If you are wondering, no, it will not be available by default in an upcoming version of Ubuntu that will be released with Linux 5.2. If the time comes we want to use Linux 5.3, we will have to perform the manual installation.