After a couple of weeks in which they were in the merger window collecting requests, and after v5.9, we have new first Release Candidate of the next version of the Linux kernel. Specifically, it is Linux 5.10-rc1 And, according to Linus Torvalds, who started the project in the '90s, everything seems pretty normal. Although the truth is that the father of Linux says that it seems that it is a larger release than he expected.
In any case, we are facing a first Release Candidate and the normal thing is just that, that everything seems normal. It is from the second, when the developers have already started to test it, that they begin to find things that are not correct, to apply changes and there may be some problems. The most common is that this happens from the third, which will be released on November 8.
Linux 5.10-rc1, all normal for now
This appears to be a larger version than I expected, and while the merge window is smaller than 5.8, it is not * much * smaller. And 5.8 was our biggest release to date. I'm not entirely sure if this is just a general uptrend (it seemed like we were stuck there for a while), or just a fluke, or perhaps because 5.9 dragged on for another week. We'll see, I guess. That said, things seem to have been going pretty well. I don't see any huge red flags and the fusion window didn't cause me any unusual problems. Famous last words… Most of the actual changes are, as usual, driver updates, but there are changes everywhere. I think the merge log below gives a kind of flavor of what has been going on at a high level, but if you are interested in the details, check out the git tree.
Linux 5.10 will be the next version of the Linux kernel and if they only release the usual 7 RCs, the next December 13.