Linus Torvalds announces the first Linux kernel 5.9 release candidate. It is available for download right now from the kernel.org website. The final release of the Linux kernel 5.9 is expected sometime in early or mid-October 2020 so don’t use this kernel in your production system.
First Linux Kernel 5.9 Release Candidate Is Now Available: Linus Torvalds
Linus’s word on Linux kernel 5.9:
This merge window felt a lot more normal than 5.8, and all the stats
confirm that it seems to be the usual size.
The only thing that stands out is yet another AMD GPU header file drop, but by now that almost counts as "usual" too. It does mean that the diff stats are dominated by those AMD updates, and almost exactly half of the diff is under drivers/gpu/drm/amd/, but it's the usual big register definitions (presumably once more generated from the hw files) and doesn't really matter in the big picture. If you ignore that, stats look very normal. Even ignoring the AMD GPU updates, drivers are still about 60% of the patch, and it's all over. Outside of drivers, it's the usual mix of architecture updates, documentation, core networking, tooling and filesystem updates. "Normal size" is still obviously pretty big, so the appended is just my merge-log as usual. For details, dig down into whichever area excites you in the git tree... Linus
