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Linus Torvalds pines for header file fix but releases Linux 5.8 anyway

Lots of love for AMD and POWER 10 and a hint of some Google's operational code making it into future releases

Linus Torvalds has released a new version of the Linux kernel.

The meta-maintainer last week pondered an eighth release candidate for Linux 5.8, but on Sunday decided “it's not just worth waiting another week when there aren't any big looming worries around.”

Torvalds did encounter “annoying noise with header file dependencies this week” and thought out loud about whether it might be time to sort that out, as follows:

“It did reinforce how nice it would be if we had some kind of tooling support to break nasty header file dependencies automatically, but if wishes were horses. Maybe some day we'll have some kind of SAT-solver for symbol dependencies that can handle all our different architectures and configurations, but right now it's just a manual pain that occasionally bites us.”

Given that Torvalds created Git and the Subsurface dive-logging application to solve problems that irked him. Could dependency-ware be next?

We’ll have to wait for that. For now, we have Linux 5.8 which includes:

  • Thunderbolt 4.0 support;
  • Improved Arm-64 security;
  • Support for booting on Power 10 CPUs;
  • An energy driver for recent AMD CPUs
  • Live migration of nested VMs under KVM on AMD CPUs

Kernel.org has all the links you need to get busy with the new release here.

As is usual, would-be-contributors to Linux 5.9 now have a couple of weeks to get their code into the queue for the next release.

Google has already proposed an intriguing contribution in the form of what it’s described as “fine-grained user-space control/scheduling” code that it uses in its own systems. Google's post says "This patchset is the first step to open-source this work." The Register has asked Google how much of this system it intends to share but has not received a reply to our July 29th request at the time of writing. ®

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