Linus Torvalds recently announced the first release candidate (rc1) for Linux kernel 5.8, which contains 800,000 new lines of code and over 14,000 changed files. This represents about a 20 percent overhaul of the kernel's files, making it one of the biggest releases ever. As Torvalds points out, “That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it is scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development.”
According to Torvalds, the development work in the release is all over the place, including fundamental core work and cleanup, as well as filesystem and architecture work, documentation, and of course all the usual driver updates. The two big driver changes are habanalabs and atomisp.
“It's worth noting that despite the size, it doesn't necessarily look like a particularly troublesome release at least so far,” Torvalds said. “Famous last words. Let's see what happens during the rest of this release,” he continued. You can read more and view the merge-log on the Linux kernel mailing list.
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