Linux 6.1-rc5 Released - This Kernel May Need An Extra Week To Bake

Linux 6.1 is inching closer to its early-to-mid December stable release with Linux 6.1-rc5 having just been released.

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.1-rc5 as the newest weekly release candidate for this kernel. Linux 6.1 is likely to be this year's long-term support release (LTS) making this cycle all the more important.

Torvalds wrote of today's 6.1-rc5 milestone:

Did things calm down and shrink this week? No. We've got about as many commits in rc5 as we had in rc4. It's not outrageously big, but it's certainly on the bigger side for this timeframe.

Am I getting worried? Not yet. There's nothing particularly worrisome in here, and the rc5 changes are just a little bit of everything, so I'm hoping it's just that it's one of those timing things and all the pull requests came in this week, and it's going to calm down now.

But we'll see. If things don't start calming down, this may be one of those releases that need an extra week. It wasn't a particularly big merge window, but I don't particularly like how the rc's keep being on the bigger side.

Torvalds' commentary can be found on the kernel mailing list.

If Linux 6.1 manages to be ready on-time it is expected to debut on 4 December otherwise if that extra week is needed it would slip to 11 December.

See my Linux 6.1 feature overview for more details on all of the prominent changes to find with this forthcoming kernel.