> Kernel 5.6 was released yesterday
> from upstream, so isn't it a bit late
> now for 5.5?
From what I've seen, it's not unusual for Debian's kernel team to wait several minor point releases until there is a kernel they're happy with - indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if the policy is to wait until the initial version of the *next* major release is out.
Often early kernel revisions have a fair share of issues - often not limited to the new features added in that major release. They are typically also backported to otherwise stable systems, so picking a good revision has some importance. Meanwhile, most fixes do make it into earlier stable kernels.
To take one example, 5.5.9 had a fix for btrfs' new checksum feature, which didn't work properly with direct I/O. So if you updated to 5.5 on its initial release and made a new FS to use it, you might have had an unpleasant surprise and spent a lot of time debugging a problem.
There was also a nasty bug in early 5.2 releases which led to delayed writes not being flushed to disk, and ultimately data loss. Unfortunately in that case it was fixed too late and made it into Debian backports. But usually, the delay helps to avoid that kind of thing.
Of course, if you really want a new feature, you can download and compile a kernel yourself, either from
kernel.org - which is what I ended up doing to get those checksums - using Debian's git repo. But that has the risk of not-fully-working code, so I'll probably be sticking with the 5.5.13 I have rather than going to 5.6 right away.
Best regards,
--
Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry