We already warned in the past week. That everything was going very well did not ensure that nothing would happen in the at least two weeks of development that were missing, and it has been. Yesterday, Linus Torvalds He launched Linux 5.15-rc6 and the first thing he talks about is that it is bigger than rc5 and also bigger than normal in this week of development. Will it be an 8th RC release?
The Finnish developer would like everything to be more compact this week, but Linux 5.15-rc6 not the sixth largest RC in Linux kernel history. Torvalds expects this to be just a random effect over time and that rc7 will be calmer. Linux 5.15 is being one of the smallest cycles in terms of commits, but an XNUMXth RC might be necessary if things haven't changed by next Sunday.
Linux 5.15-rc6 is bigger than it should
It's not _enormously_ bigger than normal, and it's not the biggest rc6 we've ever had, but it's still slightly concerning. For rc6 I really hope things have started to calm down. I hope it's one of those random sync effects, with a couple of slightly bigger hitches in the last week, and that we see next week is extra quiet because rc6 got some of the stuff that normally would have made its way to rc7 . That happen. But let's see how this goes. Loop 5.15 in general is still one of the smaller loops (at least counting commits), so I wouldn't have expected this to be one that required extra rc, but that may be what ends up happening unless next week be really nice and calm.
From what has happened in the last weeks and the words of Torvalds, it seems that we will have a stable version next Sunday October 31. Ubuntu users who want to install it when the time comes will have to do it on their own. Ubuntu 21.10 came with Linux 5.13.