The Linux kernel development is ongoing at full speed. Linus Torvalds was a bit upset about the Christmas holidays because no one wants to develop Linux in those days. After Christmas and New Year Eve holidays, everything seems to be back-to-normal as the new release candidate arrives only two weeks after a final release.
Not a big update
Linus Torvalds says that the 5.17 version will not contain massive changes. It will mostly include driver updates to support missing features and new hardware. There are also new improvements for the file systems as well as some security enhancements. Torvalds announced the new version in his traditional way.
Linus Torvalds, the developer of the Linux kernel, said:
« I’ve tagged the rc1 release a couple of hours earlier than usual, and in a timezone 10 hours before the usual one, so this merge window was technically a bit shorter than usual. But if somebody didn’t get their pull request in time, they shouldn’t have left it so late – and there’s always 5.18. Never fear – we’ll not run out of numbers.
I was nervous that this merge window would be more painful than usual due to my family-related travels, but I have to give thanks to people: a lot of you sent your pull requests early in the merge window, and while there were a couple of hiccups I hit early on, that was all before switching my main workstation to a laptop. Everything seems to have gone fairly smoothly.
Knock wood.
5.17 doesn’t seem to be slated to be a huge release, and everything looks fairly normal. We’ve got a bit more activity than usual in a couple of corners of the kernel (random number generator and the fscache rewrite stand out), but even with those things, the big picture view looks very much normal: the bulk is various driver updates, with architectures updates, documentation, and tooling being the bulk of the rest. Even with a total rewrite, that fscache diff looks more like a blip in the big picture.
And hey, it may not be a huge release, but the full shortlog would still be much too big to post – or scan through. So as is traditional, I’m just appending my merge log as a high-level view of what’s been going on.
Please give it all a test. »
The final release of the Linux kernel 5.17 is planned to release on March 13th after seven release candidate versions. However, if the number of release candidates reaches 8, the release date might change to March 20th.
As this is a release candidate version, it is not advised to be used as a daily driver. There might be bugs in release candidates, especially on the first ones, that might ruin your day.