state of the kernel update<\/a>, which on Sunday announced the release of a fifth release candidate for version 7.1 of the Linux kernel.<\/p>\n\u201cTo the surprise of absolutely nobody by now, rc5 is pretty big. Quite a bit bigger than rc5’s have traditionally been,\u201d Torvalds wrote, before revealing \u201cI’m not entirely happy about it – most of this is totally trivial stuff to random drivers, which obviously makes it all less scary, but at the same time I’m really not convinced the churn is worth it at rc5 time.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Linux kernel development cycle usually sees Torvalds open a two-week window during which contributors submit code they hope will make it into the next release. Seven release candidates (rc1-7) follow, with each supposed to represent a step towards delivering a stable update. Revised code always arrives during that process. But high volumes of new contributions to rc5 add complexity at a time work on the new kernel is usually close to completion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese things are \u2018fixes\u2019, sure, but at the same time a lot of them are simply so irrelevant that I think they’d be better off in a linux-next tree and get merged during the merge window,\u201d Torvalds suggested. \u201cAnd yes, several of these series were triggered by AI code review,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I think I’ll start being a bit more hardnosed about this kind of unnecessary churn this late in the game,\u201d he added. \u201cWe are supposed to look for *regressions*. Non-critical fixes to long-standing issues are simply not appropriate for this late in the release cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n
He then declared rc5 \u201ctoo big\u201d and said his post is \u201cthe heads-up that I’ll be pushing back on pointless pull requests with fixes that just aren’t that important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Torvalds justified his new stance on grounds that \u201cthese kinds of large rc weeks are *not* conducive to long-term stability.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTrivial fixes may be trivial, and have a pretty low chance of causing problems, but \u2018low chance\u2019 is still not \u2018zero chance.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Torvalds ended his post with instructions.<\/p>\n
\u201cStart looking closer at your pull requests, and ask yourself: \u2018Is this really a regression or serious enough that it shouldn’t just go into the development pile?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the second week in a row that Torvalds has complained that AI is complicating the job of overseeing kernel development, after he last week complained<\/a> \u201cthe continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.\u201d \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Operating Systems Warns large release candidates \u2018are *not* conducive to long-term stability\u2019 Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-465499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}