Kernel release status

[Posted September 17, 2019 by corbet]

The 5.3 kernel was released on September 15. The announcement includes a long discussion about user-space regressions — an ext4 filesystem performance improvement had caused some systems to fail booting due to a lack of entropy early after startup. "It's more that it's an instructive example of what counts as a regression, and what the whole 'no regressions' kernel rule means. The reverted commit didn't change any API's, and it didn't introduce any new bugs. But it ended up exposing another problem, and as such caused a kernel upgrade to fail for a user. So it got reverted."

Some of the more significant changes in 5.3 include scheduler utilization clamping, the pidfd_open() and clone3() system calls, bounded loop support for BPF programs, support for the 0.0.0.0/8 IPv4 address range, a new configuration option for the soon-to-be-merged realtime preemption code, and more. See the KernelNewbies 5.3 page for lots of details.

Stable updates: 5.2.15, 4.19.73, 4.14.144, 4.9.193, and 4.4.193 were released on September 16.