As Linus Torvalds advanced last week and we echoed en Ubunlog, the stable version of the Linux kernel that was being developed 7 days ago would continue to be developed for another week. That was because the father of Linux was not calm with how things were going, so a few hours ago launched Linux 5.9-rc8, the eighth RC that is reserved for releases whose development presents a problem.
And it is that Linux 5.9 has had ups and downs during its development, being especially a problem a regression that affected performance. All this was fixed a week ago, but Torvalds felt that everything was being very rushed and seven days ago he decided that he would fix everything in the eighth Release Candidate that he released yesterday Sunday, October 4.
Linux 5.9 will arrive in stable version on October 11
So things have been pretty quiet and rc8 is pretty small. I still am expecting a network hitch with some fixes so it's not like I could have made a version 5.9 final even if I wanted to, but there was no nothing scary last week, and it seems like everything is ready for a final release of 5.9 next weekend. In fact, a lot of the emails I see are about the next merge window, and I already have a pull request ready to go, which is all Okay. This is how everything is supposed to work.
This does not seem to have caught developers by surprise, who, like us, would already know that Linux 5.9-rc8 would be released yesterday and not its stable version, but Torvalds says that some of them have already started submitting requests for Linux 5.10, so this week has been quieter than usual and the core has already shrunk to where it should be. Its stable version will arrive on october 11.
This being a blog about Ubuntu, we have to say that no, it will not be available in the Groovy Gorilla to be released on October 22. Users interested in having Linux 5.9 on their Ubuntu-based operating system will need to do the manual installation.