In recent weeks, the news about the development of the Linux kernel has been that everything was going very quiet, calm, to the point of being boring. But everything has changed this week, when Linus Torvalds launched Linux 5.17-rc6. He says no, that it was not Putin's fault, but that the Finnish developer has had to go through a kind of "Zombie Apocalypse".
Still, when anyone would use the words "Zombie Apocalypse" to refer to the end of the world, or nearly so, nothing seems to have affected the core and things still seem normal. Therefore, and for the moment, nothing makes us think that the deadlines will not be met. That yes, everything could change in the next two weeks, and more if we take into account that there are things to solve.
Linux 5.17 should arrive on March 13
No one can claim that the past week was *normal*, but whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had "Zombie Apocalypse" on my bingo card, not "Putin has a mental breakdown"), It doesn't seem to have affected the core much. Things still look normal in both commit numbers and diffstats. We have the usual bulk of drivers (networks, gpu, iio, clk and usb stand out, but there are a handful of other things), and the rest is mixed. The only thing that stands out as unusual is some btrfs defragmentation fixes. But even these stand out not so much because they're huge, but simply because they're bigger than most of the rest, which is pretty small.
If everything on the table is fixed, Linux 5.17 will arrive as a stable release on Winners will be announced in March. Ubuntu 22.04 will use Linux 5.15, so if you want to use Linux 5.17 you will have to do the manual installation or use a tool like Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer.