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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: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Tuesday June 16 2020, @05:44PM
Gates had Intel design ACPI and write the ODM BIOS design tools in such a way that will leave Microsoft with the ability to implement their ACPI drivers just different enough from the specs that when ODMs write their board's DSDT tables, they won't necessarily work properly for other OSs: https://www.osnews.com/story/17689/bill-gates-on-making-acpi-not-work-with-linux/ [osnews.com]
UEFI continued with the x86-ACPI PC design so the problem only persisted.
On the bright side, Microsoft ended up depending on so much cruft in their hardware support driver layers that Windows became nearly impossible to port to anything non-UEFI leaving them out of the general ARM smartphone and laptop market short of some specific boards they designed and ordered.
compiling...