A week ago, the father of Linux He launched the first Release Candidate of the current kernel development version. That launch was larger than usual, although it was something that Linus Torvalds expected to be the first launch after the fusion advantage. He also sees as normal that Linux 5.10-rc2, thrown out A few hours ago, I was still a size larger than at other times, but still not flustered.
Perhaps the highlight of this landing is that Torvalds has removed MIC drivers (Many Integrated Core) from Intel, as the hardware was never released. Despite this removal, the size is large, but the one responsible is the ABI documentation, in its formatting patches, which seems a bit strange, but they make the documents easier to analyze. They have only been a couple of patches, but large.
Linux 5.10 is coming December 13
The other is that the diffstat looks pretty weird as I merged Greg's extract which removed the MIC drivers for hardware that never came out. That's about half the patch, though that's not why I'm calling rc2 big - it's just a confirmation. There are also some large documentation format ABI patches that seem a bit strange, but make the docs easier to parse by tools. Again just a couple of patches but a large part of the diff.
If there are no surprises, which usually results in an eighth Release Candidate, Linux 5.10 will be officially released on December 13. If there are, Torvalds will have time to release the stable version before Christmas, December 20. In any case, Ubuntu will continue to use the Linux kernel v5.8 until the release of Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo, an operating system from which we cannot rule out that it ends up using Linux 5.11.