Linus Torvalds, as usual, announced at the LKML conference that the new Linux 5.3 RC4 is now available . This is the fourth release candidate for Linux 5.3. Torvalds had previously announced that Release Candidate rc3 was unusually small, something that is expected but not always achieved. Now, with rc4, the size has increased slightly, and we'll see what the final version looks like.
Part of the blame, as Linus has said, lies with the networking. The network stack has been updated with new drivers and improvements, something that didn't happen in rc3, which is why it was smaller. But that's not all that has caused this increase in size; there have also been other changes that have contributed to the growth of the kernel's source code.
What's strange 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. In fact, it's been the largest in the last two years . So rc3 and rc4 have been unusual candidates. However, Linus has stated that he's not worried about this, as these anomalies are simply a matter of chance.
Well, among the improvements and changes included in Linux 5.3 rc4 are those I mentioned regarding networking, but there have also been changes to the sound, GPU, HID, USB, and MISC drivers, as well as some updates to architecture-dependent code such as x86, ARM64, s390, etc. In addition, there have also been updates to some tools, documentation, and fixes for file systems like GFS2 and NFS. Now we just have to wait for the final release of Linux 5.3; however, you already know that you can download and try this latest rc4 from kernel.org.