Linux kernel development has been going smoothly for a long time. Removing the seventh Release Candidate of Linux 5.15, which was released on Monday by the Torvalds travels, the news has been calm for weeks. The last week everything was very quiet, even though the fusion window was quite large, and with the Linux 5.16-rc2 thrown out a few hours ago that trend has continued.
To know if something is going well or not, the Finnish developer looks at what has happened in the same phase of past releases. That is, the week of the Linux 5.16-rc2 release it is "quite normal" if we compare it with other second Release Candidates. Things have been so normal that the mail you sent fits almost entirely in the text that we quote every week. Torvalds ends by saying that there are corrections for everything, but nothing remarkable.
Linux 5.16-rc2 continues the trend of calm
«There is nothing particularly remarkable in the last week, everything seems quite normal for a week of rc2. The commit stats look normal, and the diffstat looks pretty regular as well. Perhaps there are relatively fewer driver differences than usual, partly explained by the difference in the tools subdirectory which is larger than usual (a quarter of all), mostly due to the added kvm tests. The rest are updates to architectures, file systems, networks, documentation, etc ... »
Linux 5.16 will arrive in the form of a stable version already in 2022, at the beginning of January. If it does not require the eighth Release Candidate, it will do so on January 2, and if things get a bit complicated we can install it on January 9. Of course, as always, remember that Ubuntu users who want to use it when the time comes will have to do the installation on our own.
I don't know how many times I install it, it's nice, but after working with it I get messy and bored and I give it up after a few days. Could it be that I don't understand it?