Kernel release status

[Posted November 3, 2021 by corbet]

The 5.15 kernel was released on October 31. Linus said:

This release may have started out with some -Werror pain, but it calmed down fairly quickly and on the whole 5.15 was fair small and calm. Let's hope for more of the same - without Werror issues this time - for the upcoming merge window.

The code name for this release has been set to "Trick or Treat".

Significant features in this release include: the realtime preemption locking code, descriptorless files for io_uring, BPF timers, the removal of mandatory file-locking support, the ksmbd SMB filesystem server (but see this article), printk() indexing, the process_mrelease() system call, The DAMON memory-management optimization system, the ntfs3 filesystem implementation, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 5.15 page for more information.

Stable updates: 5.14.16, 5.10.77, 5.4.157, 4.19.215, 4.14.254, 4.9.289, and 4.4.291 were released on November 2.