Linux 6.1-rc7 Released Following A Busy Thanksgiving Week
Linux 6.1 has seen an uptick in changes this cycle compared to where Torvalds prefers seeing the patch flow slow down. He's been teetering the past few weeks on whether the v6.1 cycle will be drawn out by an extra week. As it stands now, he's leaning towards indeed declaring Linux 6.1-rc8 next week before issuing the stable Linux 6.1 kernel the following week. So Linux 6.1 stable will be out on 11 December unless this next week ends up being extremely quiet that would lead Linus to instead go straight to v6.1.
Linus commented in the 6.1-rc7 announcement:
Another week has gone by. It started quietly, and I was fairly sure that it being Thanksgiving week here in the US would mean that it would continue fairly quietly too.
But I was wrong. The end of the week was the usual "people send me their stuff on Friday", and the weekend hardly slowed people down. And so the stats for this week look almost exactly the same as they did for the previous two weeks.
And it's not just the statistics - everything feels very similar. There is really nothing here that makes me at all worried, except that it's just a bit more than I'm comfortable with. It should just have slowed down more by now.
As a result, I'm now pretty sure that this is going to be one of those "we'll have an extra week and I'll make an rc8" releases. Which then in turn means that now the next merge window will be solidly in the holiday season. Whatever. It is what it is.
Among many other bug/regression fixes to land this week, somewhat notable with Linux 6.1-rc7 is easier toggling of the AMD P-State driver in place of ACPI CPUFreq.
See my Linux 6.1 feature list for a look at all of the exciting changes coming with this kernel. Linux 6.1 is also most likely to be this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.
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