Until something is fulfilled, everything can happen. Something can go very well and go wrong at the last minute, and that seems to have happened with the kernel currently in development. Yesterday evening in Spain, Linus Torvalds launched Linux 5.19-rc7, and started your mail speaking of the “Retbleed hole”, something that they had to fix and that made everything increase in size more than usual.
In addition, they also had to correct some pending hardware problems, patches that did not have open development, and, in short, work that had to be done at the wrong time. Linux 5.19-rc7 en bigger than it should, and things have to change a lot so that next Sunday there is a stable version. Torvalds has already advanced that «5.19 will be one of those releases that will have an additional rc8 next weekend before the final release«.
Linux 5.19 will have XNUMXth RC
Another week, another rc. Obviously we've had that whole Retbleed thing, and it shows up in both the diffstat and the shortlog, and the rc7 is definitely bigger than usual.
And also, as usual, when we've had one of those pending seized hw issues, the patches didn't get development open, and then as a result all the usual sanity checks were missed by the entire build and test infrastructure of automation we have. So no wonder – there have been several small fix patches afterwards also for some corner cases.
That said, last week there were two other development trees that independently asked for an extension as well, so 5.19 will be one of those builds that gets an additional rc8 next weekend before the final release. We had some last minute btrfs rollbacks, and there is also a pending issue with an Intel GPU firmware.
The funny thing is that he ends the email saying that things don't look so bad, so, as always, he is calm. If nothing changes, and it doesn't look like it will, Linux 5.19 will arrive next August 31. As always, remember that Ubuntu users who want to use it will have to install it on their own, for example with Umki.