On November 10, the launch of the Linux kernel 5.4 rc7. This is the 7th Release Candidate of version 5.4 of the free kernel. And as usual, it has been announced by Linus Torvalds. Which by the way, recently commented for a medium that he no longer contributed code to his own project, his work is based on reading and answering emails to make big decisions about the direction of Linux.
When someone submits a patch he can reply with pseudocode, edit patches occasionally, etc. He is not a programmer as such. In fact, this is not something extremely new, since Linus's contribution in recent years has been less, and in recent years their contributions were very scarce. But let no one be alarmed, this is neither better nor worse for Linux. The project is not going to change for this reason… Also, we must assume that in the future, if Linus leaves him, Greg would stay in charge and maybe one day in the future another substitute… It's the law of life.
That said, as I said, you already have the Linux 5.4-rc7 kernel at your disposal to test if you wish. The final version of this branch is coming soon. And in the case of this RC, it is already quite clear what it will be like. New week and new rc, with not too many things to highlight on the downside, and with more changes.
The new code presents a new vboxsf driver (VirtualBox Shared Folders), there have been about 300 commits without merging, the latter being something that Linus did not like too much. He rest of news They are everywhere, 55% of the contributions are from drivers, as usual: networks, file systems (octfs2, btrfs, Ceph, ...), architecture updates (x85 and ARM64 mainly), corrections of some tools, from the kernel and VM, etc.
Linus himself has commented that nothing worries, but that there is too much contributed as a novelty, so there will be an rc8 before the final version to make sure everything is correct. It should arrive this weekend, and that will be when I make a decision to launch the final or continue, depending on how the new development work goes ...
If you want to download this version or any other - Kernel.org