Linux 5.4-rc8 is now available for public testing

Nov 18, 2019 15:40 GMT  ·  By

The highly anticipated Linux 5.4 kernel finally has a release date as Linus Torvalds announced over the weekend the last Release Candidate (RC).

Last week, Linus Torvalds was considering if there's need for an eighth Release Candidate (RC) for the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel series, which is only needed on very busy development cycles, but while things were quite calm he still released the RC8 milestone just to make sure everything is in place and working out-of-the-box because more testing never hurts.

"I'm not entirely sure we need an rc8, because last week was pretty calm despite the Intel hw workarounds landing. So I considered just making a final 5.4 and be done with it, but decided that there's no real downside to just doing the rc8 after having a release cycle that took a while to calm down," said Linus Torvalds in a mailing list announcement.

And it turns out that there are some interesting things included in Linux 5.4's last Release Candidate, such as all the mitigations for the latest Intel vulnerabilities, both on the CPU side (iTLB Multihit and TSX Async Abort (TAA)) and on the GPU side (GPU hang and invalid accesses), the removal of the vboxsf file system, which will make a comeback in Linux kernel 5.5, as well as the usual bug fixes on core networking, KVM, VFS, and VM.

Linux kernel 5.4 slated for release on November 24th, 2019

As such, we now finally have an official release date for Linux kernel 5.4 as November 24th, 2019, which is perfect considering the merge window for the next major release, Linux kernel 5.5, will be open from November 24th until December 8th when the first Release Candidate should hit the streets. Linux kernel 5.4 promises many cool new features, especially built-in exFAT support, thanks to Microsoft.

Until, Linus Torvalds urges the Linux community to give the Linux kernel 5.4's RC8 a final try to make sure everything works well. As usual, you can download the latest Release Candidate of Linux kernel 5.4 from kernel.org or through our free software portal, but please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version, not suitable for any production use.