Yesterday Sunday, already in a more normal schedule after the first two Release Candidates, Linus Torvalds He launched Linux 5.17-rc3. According to the Finnish developer, in the last seven days everything has been very normal, with a number of commits that falls within the average. Yes there has been more work on the file system, with very varied activity, but in general there is nothing to worry the father of Linux.
Although the truth is that Torvalds is rarely seen (or rather "read") worried. The most he usually expresses is the need to launch an eighth Release Candidate, and sometimes that there are things he doesn't like, but he always feels that he has everything under control. This is the development of Linux 5.17, although everything could change in the next four weeks.
Linux 5.17 will introduce a lot of support for new hardware
The diffstat shows that we have had more file system activity than usual. Filesystem activity is quite varied, ranging from the reintroduction of fscache support by cifs after the rewrite, to vfs-level bugfixes, to filesystem-specific fixes (btrfs, ext4, xfs), and some Kconfig unicode cleanup. So it's not just one thing, it just happened that we had more file system stuff than is common at the moment. That said, driver fixes (networking, gpu, sound, pin control, platform drivers, scsi, etc.) still dominate. On the driver side, some reversions to re-enable hw-accelerated scrolling for legacy fbdev devices perhaps stand out.
Linux 5.17-rc3 is the third RC of 5.17, a Linux kernel that will be released on March 13.