A week ago, Linus Torvalds He launched the third Release Candidate of Linux kernel v5.5 with many fixes. We were on December 22, the first day of Christmas in countries like Spain, so we could say that they included the work that they were going to stop doing in the nearest future. We also take this impression after the launch de Linux 5.5-rc4, version available since yesterday the 29th, because it has not included many new features.
Torvalds goes so far as to say that practically not worth launching a new RC, but they have included some corrections and in the end it was decided to launch it and not let seven more days pass to deliver them to the public. Understandably, less work was done in the week of December 25, and although the father of Linux doesn't mention it, this could mean that the stable release will arrive later than expected.
Linux 5.5-rc4 was hardly worth launching
To no one's surprise, the past week was very quiet. AIt's hardly worth doing a rc launch, but there are some solutions here, so here is the usual Sunday afternoon rc. They are drivers (gpio, i915, scsi, libata), some fixes in cifs and fixes in io_uring. And some updates from kunit / selftest. And one or two little random things. Go give it a try, you still have some time before the New Years Eve celebrations start. Let's all hope for a happy new year, but I I suspect the next rc will also be a bit small since most people are probably still in vacation mode ...
Among the changes mentioned, we have some in the drivers, fixes in cifs, some fixes in io_uring, updates in kunit / selftest and little else. Torvalds invites us to try the new version, although he takes into account that it will soon be the new year and he does not want to pressure anyone.
Linux 5.5 will arrive at the end of january or early February and it will be the kernel version that, in all likelihood, uses Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa and all its official flavors.