Linus Torvalds has officially started the development of Linux kernel 5.8 with the very first release candidate, and the single word that best describes this new version is “big.”

“5.8 looks big. Really big,” Torvalds explains.

At this point, the key numbers shared by Torvalds indeed seem to confirm this is the case: there are over 14,000 files that have been changed, 14,000 non-merge commits, and some 800,000 new lines.

Torvalds says that at some level, Linux kernel 5.8 reminds of 4.9, which itself has been one of the biggest releases in a long time.

“As of -rc1, it's right up there with v4.9, which has long been our biggest release by quite a bit in number of commits. Yes, 5.8-rc1 has a couple fewer commits than 4.9-rc1 did, but in many ways it's a much more comprehensive release despite that,” Torvalds explains.

“The 4.9 kernel was artificially big partly because of the greybus subsystem that was merged in that release, but also because v4.8 had had a longer rc series and thus there was more pent up development. In 5.8, we have no sign of those kinds of issues making the release bigger - there's just simply a lot of development in there.”
First RC is live

So is there anything special that stands out in this release? Not really, and this is the most important part of the whole thing. While 5.8 not coming with any particular highlight, it’s one massive release mostly because of the amount of changes that are happening in the update, including several concerning drivers.

“In the 5.8 merge window we have modified about 20% 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,” Torvalds notes.

The first release candidate is now live, so more information will be shared as the development advances with more testing builds.