Software Update: Linux Kernel 5.0-rc1

The first release candidate of Linux Kernel 5.0 has been released. The Kernel is the heart of the operating system and, simply put, it sits as a layer between the hardware and the applications. Linus writes in his announcement that there is no specific reason to change the version number from 4.21 to 5.0 and that the reader can make up his own reason. As usual you can click Phoronix find a summary of the changes, including support for AMD FreeSync, a Raspberry Pi Touchscreen driver, a new console font for HiDPI/retina displays and Adiantum data encryption. Linus’ announcement looks like this:

Linux 5.0-rc1

So this was a fairly unusual merge window with the holidays, and as a result I’m not even going to complain about the pull requests that ended up coming in late. It all mostly worked out fine, I think. And lot of people got their pull requests in early, and hopefully had a calm holiday season. Thanks again to everybody.

The numbering change is not indicative of anything special. If you want to have an official reason, it’s that I ran out of fingers and toes to count on, so 4.21 became 5.0. There’s no nice git object numerology this time (we’re _about_ 6.5M objects in the git repo), and there isn’t any major particular feature that made for the release numbering either. Of course, depending on your particular interests, some people might well find a feature _they_ like so much that they think it can do as a reason for incrementing the major number.

So go wild. Make up your own reason for why it’s 5.0.

Because as usual, there’s a lot of changes in there. Not because this merge window was particularly big – but even our smaller merge windows aren’t exactly small. It’s a very solid and average merge window with just under 11k commits (or about 11.5k if you count merges).

The stats look fairly normal. About 50% is drivers, 20% is architecture updates, 10% is tooling, and the remaining 20% ​​is all over (documentation, networking, filesystems, header file updates, core kernel code..). Nothing particular stands out, although I do like seeing how some ancient drivers are getting put out to pasture (*cough*isdn*cough*).

As usual even the shortlog is much too big to post, so the summary below is only a list of the pull requests I merged.

go test. Kick the tires. Be the first kid on your block running a 5.0 pre-release kernel.

Linus