Two weeks ago, Linus Torvalds He launched Linux 5.4. After the release of a new major version of the Linux kernel, the kernel developer team gets down to work for the next version, starting with collecting requests in a more serious and official way. Today, two weeks later, Torvalds has released Linux 5.5-rc1, the kernel version that is likely to be included in the next version of Canonical's operating system, i.e. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
From what we read in the email that you sent this week, everything started out being quite normal. The size of v5.5-rc1 is slightly larger than other First Release Candidates, but very little and there is nothing unusual. A little over the middle of the patch are drivers, while the next section in which they have introduced more changes has been in architecture updates.
Linux 5.5 will arrive at the end of January
Torvalds and his team usually release seven Release Candidates before offering us the stable version. That means Linux 5.5 could arrive on January 26. Two weeks later they would release rc1 from v5.6, and if they released 7 'candidates', the stable release would occur on March 29th. This means that most likely Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa It arrived with v5.5 of the Linux kernel, but we also thought that Eoan Ermine would arrive with Linux 5.2 and in the end it did have time to include the kernel v5.3.
As for the confirmed news of the Linux kernel version currently in development, we recently wrote an article in which we explained that, among other things, support for LivePatch will be improved, an ACPI driver from System76 will be added for its new Coreboot or energy savings will be improved in hybrid laptops with Intel Graphics and a discrete NVIDIA GPU.