Linus Torvalds, the principal developer of the Linux kernel, has expressed concern about the rate of changes in the current release, and how it might cause issues with the imminent holiday season.
Torvalds noted his surprise at the uncharacteristically increasing number of changes and how it could lead to an issue in the release announcement for the fifth release candidate (rc5) of the upcoming v5.10 of the kernel.
“The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big, even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm down and shrink,” observed Torvalds.
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Unusual business
Torvalds warning follows up on last week’s 5.10-rc4 release where he made the same observations about the spiraling number of changes, but expected things to calm down in the coming week.
Kernel 5.10 will be the last stable kernel release of the year, which as per tradition will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release as recently confirmed by kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman.
The number of bug fixes are unusually high than it normally is five weeks past the merge window which is what surprises Torvalds, who adds that “in pure numbers of commits, this is the largest rc5 we've had in the 5.x series.”
He’s quick to add though that things are still under control and that “there's nothing in here that makes me particularly nervous.”
If all goes as per plan, we can expect the Linux Kernel v5.10 to be released around mid-December.
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