All going well, the stable release should appear sometime in August.
Introducing the release candidate, Torvalds said it was "right up there with v4.9, which has long been our biggest release by quite a bit in number of commits." That said, the 4.9 kernel was "artificially big" because of a couple of special factors, whereas 5.8 is a "more comprehensive release."
Torvalds said: "The development is really all over the place: there's tons of fairly fundamental core work and cleanups, but there is also lots of filesystem work and obviously all the usual driver updates too. Plus documentation and architecture work." He added: "We have modified about 20 per cent of all the files in the kernel source repository. That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it _is_ scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development."
While the code for the kernel is large, only a small part of it ends up in any individual system, since the kernel source contains code for every chip architecture and hardware it supports. In early 2018, maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said that "an average laptop uses around 2 million lines of kernel from 5,000 files to function properly." At the time, there were 25 million lines of code in the kernel, whereas now there are over 28 million.
See also: Linux 5.8 Kernel Features Include New Intel/AMD Capabilities, Security Improvements, Optimizations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @05:37PM (2 children)
Your skills are not up to date. Good luck getting a job these days.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bryan on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:11PM
Supporting Windows has been the same since the very beginning: Reboot. If that doesn't work then: Reformat. It's not like you can see the code to determine the actual problem, let alone change the code to fix it.
On the plus side, relatives tend to bug you less about fixing their computer after you forcefully wipe it a few times.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:00PM
Wait, was that a joke or are you really that stupid?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.