A week ago, Linus Torvalds threw a seventh RC and said that this would be one of those cores that would need an eighth. A few hours ago, the Finnish developer has made good forecasts and launched Linux 5.19-rc8, and among what he has had to do there have been more corrections for the "retbleed mess", a security flaw in which it was already known that they were going to continue working in the last seven days.
Torvalds also says that he is glad to have released another RC, and there is not much particularly interesting, in the sense that everything looks good. Therefore, and although it does not mention it, it is more than likely that the stable version will arrive next Sunday.
Linux 5.19 could arrive on Sunday, July 31
Nothing really surprising here - a few minor fixes for the retbleed mess as expected, and the usual one-liners elsewhere.
The diffstat mainly shows some documentation updates and a couple of drivers with larger fixes (eg the i916 GuC firmware thing), and the network sysctl data race log.
So everything makes me say "yeah, I'm glad I did another rc, but there's nothing particularly interesting here." Which is right. A brief summary for the curious.
Although there have been cases, on a few occasions we have seen a ninth RC being launched. That, added to the fact that everything is in good shape, makes us think that the next day 31 July There will be a stable version. Considering the dates we are in, it is likely that this Linux 5.19 is the version of the kernel that uses Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu. As for the existing Jammy Jellyfish, Focal Fossa or Bionic Beaver, users who want to install it at the same time as its release will have to use tools like Umki.
These things are because people don't want to. It never finishes developing. From the first steps of Linux, and it ends up tiring you or it works or it doesn't work. So many updates!