Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 5.8. He’s said throughout the 5.8 release candidate kernels that 5.8 is a big release, yet the key standout is that there isn’t a key standout. While in the past, big releases have been marked by specific contributions - such as significant register descriptions for AMD GPUs in kernel 4.12 - 5.8 is “really all over the place”, with over 14,000 non-merge (summary) code commits and counting.
The first two weeks of a kernel development cycle are referred to as the “merge window”, when disruptive changes are allowed and new features land. The latter weeks of the cycle are for stabilisation and bug fixing. New features landing in 5.8 include a tweak to how the kernel handles swappiness, security fixes and many other enhancements. LWN has a good writeup at www.lwn.net.
Andy Lutomirski noted that support for FSGSBASE is queued up for Linux 5.9 and could do with some additional testing from the curious. The tests are in tools/testing/ selftests/x86/fsgsbase_64.