Development of the next version of Linux is going diametrically opposite to that of the current 6.2. The previous development period coincided with the Christmas holidays, and although everything seemed to be going well, Linus Torvalds felt more comfortable launching an eighth RC. On Sunday afternoon, what we submitted was Linux 6.3-rc4, Y, like seven days ago, everything is going quite normal, or at least for the week in which we are.
Although to be true to the truth, Torvalds It does not say that everything is normal, not everything, but in its "most". Yes, it all fits as expected, but they had to do a lot of fixes in XFS, which caused the diffstat to move around a bit more. Even with everything, the changes in the code are much smaller than in other occasions, and the father of Linux hopes that everything will continue going like this during the month that remains until the release of the stable version.
Linux 6.3 will arrive in April
Things seem pretty normal for this point in the release process. All the stats look very regular, and the diffstat mostly does too.
I say "mostly" only because we had a bunch of xfs fixes last week, which makes the diffstat skew that way more than usual. But even that is mostly for a self-test addition. The actual changes to the code are much minor.
So instead of the usual 50+% drivers, rc4's diffstat is roughly "one third drivers, one third filesystems, one third rest". Not all the filesystem stuff is xfs, of course – we've got cifs, btrfs and ksmbd fixed too.
Linux 6.3 is expected by the end of April, for the 23rd at first. If it requires an eighth RC, it would arrive on the 30th, but something very bad has to happen so that it does not arrive in April. Although I have never seen it, or I don't remember it, Torvalds says that there have been cases in which he has launched an RC ninth, and it is something that cannot be ruled out because the precedents exist. When the time comes, Ubuntu users who want to use it will have to do it on their own. Lunar Lobster is expected to ship with Linux 6.2.