Linux 4.5-rc5 is now available for public testing

Feb 21, 2016 01:50 GMT  ·  By

Surprise, surprise! It looks like Linus Torvalds has made an early release of the next RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel series, as announced on Saturday, February 20, 2016.

Linus Torvalds makes his usual RC announcements for the next major kernel release late Sunday or every week, but for some reason, he decided to drop the fifth Release Candidate build a day earlier than expected, which sounds very good to us.

According to Mr. Torvalds, it would appear that things remained calm for the RC5 build of Linux kernel 4.5, with the exception of a small issue related to the s390 hardware architecture and VM THP (Transparent Huge Pages).

"Things continue to look normal, and things have been fairly calm. Yes, the VM THP cleanup seems to be still problematic on s390, but other than that I don't see anything particularly worrisome," said Linus Torvalds in the announcement.

What's new in Linux kernel 4.5 Release Candidate 5? Well, there's about 55 percent updated drivers, in particular for things like DRM and CLK, and approximately 20 percent architectures updated, especially for ARM, x86, PowerPC (PPC), s390, and m68k.

Other than that, there are a few improvements to the EXT4, CIFS, and EFI file systems, along with documentation updates, and various under-the-hood core kernel and header files changes.

Early adopters can test the fifth RC build of Linux kernel 4.5 by downloading the sources right now via Softpedia or directly from the kernel.org website, just please don't replace your stable kernel packages with it.