Version 4.5 of the Linux kernel has been loosed upon a waiting world.

This release nearly didn't make it: Linux lord Linus Torvalds writes that he came close to ordering an eighth release candidate, as “We did have one nasty regression that got fixed yesterday [Sunday - Ed], and the networking pull early in the week was larger than I would have wished for.”

There's not a vast amount to be excited about in the new release. Of most interest to business are features like KVM getting better at emulating Hyper-V, which will come in handy. S390 users can now run up to 248 virtual CPUs. There's also a big update to the flash-memory-friendly F2FS file-system that speeds it up, improves cache flushing and doing better at defragging.

Gamers will enjoy the many new bits of GPU-supporting code, which is also important for the rest of us because 4.5 adds support for Intel's forthcoming Kaby Lake architectures, the 14nm sucessor to Skylake.

Linux often caters to esoteric tastes, which is why this time around Torvalds has seen fit to include code that does a better job handling PS/2 mice. For both of you still using those. The same code also improves Linux's ability to handle touch screens.

Linus Torvalds has now opened the 4.6 merge window and if he's true to form we can expect Linux 4.6 around early May. ®