Summary
Linux 7.0-rc5 has fewer changes; the spike of fixes is easing, and commits are mostly small tweaks.
Drivers, networking, and filesystems see minor updates; diffs overall look innocuous.
Testers urged to try rc5 and report issues to help ensure a smooth Linux 7.0 launch.
Well, that was a close one. Previously, we reported on how some Linux 7.0 release candidates were seeing a larger number of changes and additions than usual. Usually, more stuff getting added to an OS is better, but because the release candidate is all about testing and making sure things aren’t breaking, a high number of changes means that things are, unfortunately, breaking.
Fortunately, the initial spike in fixes, while still high, has declined significantly for release candidate 5. Things are looking pretty great for a stable Linux 7.0 release, and that’s always a good sign.
Related
Linux 7.0 is ready for you to test as it hits Release Candidate status
It’s big, but not BIG big.
Linux 7.0 release candidate 5 shows that the bugs are calming down
Here’s hoping it continues to improve
As spotted by Phoronix, Linus Torvald sent out an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. In the last few emails, Linus has been a little concerned with the high number of fixes and tweaks getting committed to the kernel, but because the changes were seemingly quite minor, he didn’t let it get to him. Now, with Linux 7.0-rc5’s release, it seems things are beginning to look a lot better:
It looks like things are starting to calm down – rc5 is smaller than the previous rc’s this merge window, although it still tracks a bit larger than rc5s historically do. I’ll still take it as a good sign overall.
The diffstat looks fairly normal – half drivers (gpu and networking, but unusually some serial updates too). But on the whole it’s all pretty small – most of the commits are small few-liners.
Outside of drivers, it’s the usual mixed bag – core networking, some filesystem updates, bpf, selftests and some architecture fixes.
So while the rc’s have trended bigger than usual this release, on the whole it all continues to look fairly innocuous. Please keep testing,
Linus
If you’d like to give the Linux 7.0-rc5 build a test run yourself, you can download it over on LKML. Just be sure to report any issues you find; it’s up to testers to ensure that Linux 7.0 has as smooth a launch as possible by bringing attention to the major pain points with the system.
Related
Linux 7.0 may receive a self-repairing feature that automatically fixes your XFS filesystem
No more disk checks, hopefully.