Seven days ago, the news about the Linux kernel was mostly about when it arrived. He did it on Sunday, as (practically) always, but hours before. Today, January 30, we have returned to to receive a Release Candidate hours earlier than usual, in this case Linux 5.17-rc2. Last Sunday, the Finnish developer told us that the advance was due to family trips, but today he has not given any explanation.
What he did say is that Linux 5.17-rc2 has fallen on the side of the large in size, but also that it is likely to be a random fluctuation with no other more important reasons. And it is that it is in the second Release Candidates where developers and testers begin to find and correct bugs, so the size usually grows at this point.
Linux 5.17-rc2 arrives with a "large" size, but within normality
Nothing hugely surprising here - it's a bit on the larger side for an rc2, but maybe part of it is that there's an NFS client that was merged late due to being marked as spam. But most likely it is the usual random fluctuation, without a deeper reason.
For all the rest, the third part of the work has been left by patches for drivers, but not everything is clear from the request for the NFS client. Work has been done on a bit of everything, such as architectures, KVM updates for arm64 and x86, and other "random noise", such as documentation, networking, and tools.
If all goes according to plan and only 7 RCs are released, Linux 5.17 stable will arrive on Winners will be announced in March. Ubuntu users who want to install it will eventually have to do so on their own. We remember that Ubuntu 22.04 will use Linux 5.15 as they are both (system and kernel) LTS versions.