The development of the next version of the Linux kernel is going very smoothly. Linus Torvalds said so last week and in the previous three, and commented again on Sunday afternoon. yesterday launched Linux 5.18-rc5, and the first thing he said is that if the rc4 was a bit smaller than usual, things have been reversed this week, and the rc5 is a bit larger than usual in this week of development.
But soon he wants to make it clear that it's just a little bigger, so, as usual, he's not worried. It has been a normal week, where the work may require some patch or some change that makes things look different, but this time they do it for a little.
Linux 5.18-rc5 is a reasonable size
So if last week's rc4 was tiny and smaller than usual, it seems to have been partly the timing, and rc5 is now a bit bigger than usual. But just a bit bigger - certainly not outrageously, and not something I'm worried about (admittedly partly because of that little rc4: it doesn't seem like we're having any more trouble than usual, it's just that the job ended up shifting a little to this last week).
The diffstat also looks normal, albeit with a strange bulge for the n_gsm tty ldisc code. He could have sworn that the thing was legacy and that no one used it, but he would have apparently been very wrong about that.
Linux 5.18 is expected to arrive in the form of a stable version next May 22, unless they have to launch at least one RC8, in which case it would arrive on May 27. Ubuntu users who want to install it right away will need to do so on their own or by using tools like Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer.