Linus Torvalds has re-announced a new final version of the Linux kernel in LKML. This time it's about Linux version 5.3 that brings some of the news that we have been seeing in the releases of the previous Release Candidates. You already know that there has been an extra RC, they have reached rc8, since Linux considered it necessary. One of the reasons for that extra week of development was a trip I had planned.
That left some things pending and I did not want to neglect that. In addition, they have had some major problems, such as certain FS btrfs behavior issues. But they have been able to overcome that and continue with development, although Linux 5.3 arrives a bit late compared to what was initially planned. So now you can download the result to configure it, compile it and install it on your distro to test what's new ...
Regarding the changes, apart from solve all that many problems that I mentioned previously from rc8 and that caused errors, there are some things that have been polished, such as improvements for the I / O system, changes and news regarding the drivers, of course those of networks, updates for the processor architectures ( s390, RISC-V, x86, ARM,…), IPC improvements, FS improvements (such as btrfs), KVM and VirtIO changes, etc.
Now to work for the first rc of Linux version 5.4. Developers will start to look ahead, as Linus Torvalds the window to add new features to the future Linux 5.4. Although, it is probably not the last news about the Linux 5.3 branch that we have, as some maintainers will take care of continuing to patch it if problems arise, so we will see Linux 5.3.x versions soon. You will already know, that the version numbers start with the highest number (5), followed by the minor number (3) and then the revision numbers for minor changes (patches for bugs and vulnerabilities).