El last week's article We started by saying that "it was all laughter until the fifth RC arrived." This week we should say something diametrically opposite, since Linus Torvalds He launched Linux 5.12-rc6 and says it is positively tiny. Examining the situation, the Finnish developer now believes he has found the explanation for the exaggerated size of the fifth RC, and it was not what he thought. The increase in size was due to deadlines.
So, once the size is restored, the alarms have stopped ringing and it seems that the eighth CR will not be necessary, a wildcard that Torvalds saves for when a kernel in development gives problems and you have to finish polishing things. Although the seventh RC has yet to be released and nothing strange will happen in the following week, at the moment everything looks good.
Looks like we will have Linux 5.12 in two weeks
Well, if rc5 was bigger than usual, and I was concerned what that meant for this release, rc6 is positively small. So I think it was due to the usual random time fluctuations, probably and mainly network updates (which were in rc5, but not in rc6). Which means that unless things change in the next two weeks, the schedule for this release will be normal.
If nothing happens, and as we read in this week's mail, Linux 5.12 will arrive in the form of a stable version next April 18. As always, remember that Ubuntu 21.04 will arrive with Linux 5.11 and Canonical adds a version of the kernel and only updates it to add security patches, so those who want to use the new version will have to do the installation on their own. It can be done manually, but we recommend using Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer, a fork of the no longer GPL Ukuu.