Last week, Linus Torvalds was considering if there’s need for an eighth Release Candidate (RC) for the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel series, which is only needed on very busy development cycles, but while things were quite calm he still released the RC8 milestone just to make sure everything is in place and working out-of-the-box because more testing never hurts. And it turns out that there are some interesting things included in Linux 5.4’s last Release Candidate, such as all the mitigations for the latest Intel vulnerabilities, both on the CPU side (iTLB Multihit and TSX Async Abort (TAA)) and on the GPU side (GPU hang and invalid accesses), the removal of the vboxsf file system, which will make a comeback in Linux kernel 5.5, as well as the usual bug fixes on core networking, KVM, VFS, and VM.