As has advanced Linus Torvalds in this week's mail is unusual. Yes it is that it does not matter what day it is or where it is; He always tries to find time for the nucleus he develops to come out when it is his turn, but this week he has told us about another possibility. Even if Linux 5.16-rc5 It is normal in terms of size, the Finnish developer believes that the stable version will not arrive when expected.
Size is slightly larger than normalBut Torvalds thinks it's because people are handing over their work to him now to be more free at Christmas. For that reason, he believes that this will be one of those releases that need an eighth RC, and not because things are going badly, but because he believes that people are going to work less and they will not arrive on time.
Linux 5.16 would arrive on January 9
"Give it a try - with the holidays just around the corner, things will probably slow down on both the development and testing fronts, and as a result I hope it will also expand the rc series for another week, not because it's necessarily necessary. (It's too early to tell, but it doesn't seem like it), but simply because no one will want to open the next merge window immediately in the new year. '
Going things how were they, and as a matter of fact, it was originally thought that Linux 5.16 would arrive on January 2nd. Taking into account Christmas, and that that day falls just one day after New Years, it is most likely that we will have a stable version on January 9. Things would have to be twisted a lot so that one more week of testing would still be needed, but as you can never say, if you still need a rc9, it would arrive on January 16.
We remember that Ubuntu users who want to install it when the time comes will have to do it on their own, since Canonical launches its system with a kernel and only updates it with security and maintenance patches.