The Linux 3.3 Kernel Is Not Yet Ready

While last week it looked like the final release of the Linux 3.3 kernel was imminent, this didn't end up exactly being the case. Due to an up-tick in patches being merged this week, Linus Torvalds decided to go ahead and tag Linux 3.3-rc7 on Saturday afternoon.

The 3.3-rc7 announcement by Linus:

I had been hoping that -rc6 would be the last -rc, but no such luck. Things just haven't calmed down sufficiently for me to feel comfy doing a final 3.3 release without another -rc, so here we are: 3.3-rc7 is out.

Now, none of the fixes here are all that scary in themselves, but there were just too many of them, and across various subsystems. Networking, memory management, drivers, you name it. And instead of having fewer commits than in -rc6, we have more of them. So my hope that things would calm down simply just didn't materialize.

I really would prefer not having an -rc8, though. And I do think we're in fairly good shape, I just didn't think we were quite there yet for a release. Thus this will hopefully *really* be the final -rc.

So hopefully next week we'll now end up seeing the Linux 3.3 kernel be officially released with its many changes. At least this gives developers an extra week to prepare their patches for the Linux 3.4 kernel merge window.