Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 5.13 Release Candidate

Linux Kernel 5.13 Release

Two weeks after the release of Linux kernel 5.12 series, the merge window for the next major version, Linux kernel 5.13, is now closed and Linus Torvalds just announced today the general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC).

It’s time to get busy again and test the next major Linux kernel branch, Linux 5.13, which had a fairly big merge window, according to Linus Torvalds. However, it looks like things have proceeded fairly smoothly and the first Release Candidate is now ready for public testing.

Once again, the biggest changes in Linux kernel 5.13 appear to be made around the AMD GPU open-source graphics driver for AMD Radeon GPUs, which received a “huge dump” of descriptor header files, but there’s a lot more to look for in the upcoming Linux kernel release compared to Linux kernel 5.12.

“Those things are huge, and autogenerated from hardware descriptions, and the end result is that they often end up overshadowing all the other changes if you only look at the diffs. In fact, over a third of the diff for 5.13-rc1 is just from those kinds of header files,” said Linus Torvalds.

As usual, Linux kernel 5.13 will be packed full of updated and new drivers, especially for GPU and networking, along with the usual improvements and bug fixes for filesystems, architectures (x86, ARM, PowerPC), tooling, process handling, VM, and last but not least documentation (devicetree bindings). Check out Linus Torvalds’ merge shortlog here for all the technical details.

The final release of Linux 5.13 is expected to hit the streets sometime at the end of June or in early July, depending on how many Release Candidates Linus Torvalds decides to release during the entire development cycle.

Until then, if you want to help with the testing, go ahead and download the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 5.13 kernel series right now from kernel.org. Please keep in mind though that this is a pre-release version, so don’t install it on any production machine.

Last updated 3 years ago

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