At the time we are in, we have to expect surprises in the development of the Linux kernel, and these can be good or bad. In the past weekDue to Thanksgiving, we had a third Release Candidate that was smaller than average in that week of development, and the story has been repeated in Linux 5.16-rc4. Although this time Linus Torvalds has not given any explanation.
El this week's mail it has been short; everything fits in an article like this. Linus Torvalds says Linux 5.16-rc4 is quite small, and there is no news to highlight other than that he would have liked things related to kvm to be calmer. For everything else, there has been work on drm fixes, file systems, architecture updates and some driver fixes.
Linux 5.16 is coming in less than a month
«Quite a small rc4 this week. Three areas stand out in the diff: some kvm fixes (and tests), network driver fixes, and sound fixes in the tegra SOC. The rest is pretty spread out: drm fixes, some filesystem stuff, various architecture updates, and some random driver fixes. Nothing seems so scary, although I certainly hope the kvm part will calm down.
If the seven usual Release Candidates are released, which would mean that there have been no problems, Linux 5.16 will arrive in stable form on next january 2. Taking into account that it is a day after the new year, it cannot be ruled out that the work will slow down a bit and we will have to wait another week, until January 9, to be able to install the stable version. As always, remember that Ubuntu users who want to install it when the time comes will have to do it on their own, since Ubuntu 21.10 will remain on Linux 5.13.