Linus Torvalds, as usual, has made public in the LKML that the new Linux 5.3 RC4 is now available. It is the fourth candidate to become the final version Linux 5.3. Torvalds already announced that the Release Candidate rc3 had been unusually small, something that is expected but not always achieved. Now, with the rc4 it has returned to a larger size, therefore it has gained a bit and we will see how the final version looks.
Part of the blame, as Linus has said, lies with the networks. The network stack has been updated with new drivers and improvements, something that in rc3 did not happen and that is why it was smaller. But that is not all that this increase in size has produced, there have also been other changes that have contributed to the growth of the kernel source code.
The weird thing is that not only was rc3 smaller than normal, but rc4 has been larger than normal, at least in terms of the number of commits it has had. In fact, it has been the biggest in the last two years. So rc3 and rc4 have been unusual candidates. However, Linus has expressed that he is not concerned about this, as these anomalies are only a matter of chance.
Well, among the improvements and changes included in Linux 5.3 rc4 are those that I have mentioned about networks, but there have also been changes in the sound drivers, GPU, HID, USB, MISC, as well some updates to the code dependent on architectures like x86, ARM64, s390, etc. Additionally, there have also been updates for some tools, documentation, and fixes for file systems like GFS2 and NFS. Now we just have to wait for the development of Linux 5.3 to finish, however, you already know that you can download and try this latest rc4 from kernel.org.