After two months of development Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 5.6 stable kernel
So I'll admit to vacillating between doing this 5.6 release and doing another -rc.
This has a bit more changes than I'd like, but they are mostly from davem's networking fixes pulls, and David feels comfy with them. And I looked over the diff, and none of it looks scary. It's just slightly more than I'd have preferred at this stage - not doesn't really seem worth delaying a release over.
So about half the diff from the final week is network driver fixlets, and some minor core networking fixes. Another 20% is tooling - mostly bpf and netfilter selftests (but also some perf work).
The most notable changes are WireGuard VPN integration, USB4 support, time namespaces, ability to create TCP overload handlers using BPF, initial support MultiPath TCP, getting the kernel out of the problem of 2038, the mechanism “bootconfig”, FS ZoneFS.
New version accepted 13702 fixes from 1810 developers, patch size - 40 Mb (changes affected 11577 files, added 610012 lines of code, removed 294828 lines). About 45% of all changes presented in 5.6 are related to device drivers, about 15% of the changes are related to updating code specific to hardware architectures, 12% are related to the network stack, 4% to file systems and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.
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