A stable version was expected, everything indicated that today, March 13, we would have a stable version, but what we have is Linux 5.17-rc8. That's the way things are: everything can paint very well, but seven days is a long time for a problem to appear that needs to be solved. That happened yesterday: there have been attacks related to Spectre, so the father of Linux has decided to delay the stable version of Linux 5.17 until things are under control.
Torvalds reserves the eighth release candidate to correct a bug serious, and even a ninth, and that joker, at least the first, is what he has used this week. The Finnish developer says that, Specter aside, everything is fixed, so it's all set for the stable release.
Linux 5.17 is now expected on March 20
Last weekend, I thought I would release the final version of 5.17 today.
That was then, this is now. Last week was a bit of a mess, mostly because of the embargoed patches we had pending with another variation of the specter attacks. And while the patches were mostly fine, we did get the usual "because it was hidden, all of our normal test automation didn't see it either."
And once the automation sees things, it tries all the crazy combinations that people don't tend to use or try in any normal case, and so there was a (small) flurry of fixes for the patches.
None of this was really surprising, but I naively thought I might do the final version this weekend anyway.
As this week has shown, everything can change in seven days, but Linux 5.17 is expected to finally arrive next Sunday March 20. We remember that Ubuntu users who want to install it on the day of its release will have to do it manually or using tools such as Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer.