A week ago, Linus Torvalds He launched the first RC of the first kernel version to use Rust. As he said, it is not that there was real code, but if the foundations had been laid. A few hours ago, in the last days of Sunday, the Finnish developer launched Linux 6.1-rc2, and with the first information you added in your weekly mail, we could already be thinking that the eighth RC reserved for the problematic versions will be necessary.
And it is that Linux 6.1-rc2 has arrived being "unusually large". The good thing is that Torvalds has everything 100% identified and controlled. There was simply a mistake made in the past that has been corrected in this Release Candidate. If he's right, rc3 could be bigger too, but because it's in the third week that kernel testers start to find out what needs to be improved.
Linux 6.1 is coming in December
hmm. Normally rc2 is a pretty quiet week, and for the most part it started out that way too, but then things took a strange turn. The end result: 6.1-rc2 ended up being unusually large.
The main reason is pretty benign, though: Mauro had screwed up the media tree pull request during the merge window, so rc2 ends up having an "oops, here's the missing part" moment. Since everything was in linux-next (yes, I've checked that, lest anyone else try that trick), I ended up getting that missing part out during rc2 week.
If there are no more serious problems, Linux 6.1 should arrive on December 4. If there are, their arrival would be delayed by a week, and they would be available on the 11th of the same month. When the time comes, and as always, Ubuntu users who want to install it will have to install it on their own, either manually or using tools like Mainline. Ubuntu 23.04, which will arrive in April 2023, should use the 6.2 kernel.