Linux 6.7 Won't Be Out For New Year's Eve

If you were hoping to spend your New Year's Eve compiling a freshly-minted Linux 6.7 stable kernel, you'll need to draft new plans as Linux 6.7 stable won't be released until the following week.

With how the Linux 6.7 cycle has been trending, it would normally mean Linux 6.7-rc7 this coming Sunday, 24 December, and to then release Linux 6.7 stable on 31 December (New Year's Eve) barring any last minute issues coming up in the week prior. But Linus Torvalds announced today that he's already intending to delay the release by one week due to the end-of-year holidays.

The Linux 6.7 cycle has been trending well with no major issues/regressions coming up and Linus Torvalds has noted in his weekly release candidate messages that things have been progressing normally. But with Christmas and New Year's, he's planning to delay the release by one week namely to avoid opening the Linux 6.8 merge window on New Year's Day.

His plan is to release Linux 6.7 stable on 7 January and in turn the Linux 6.8 merge window will open on 8 January, past the holidays to avoid any extra burden on kernel maintainers. Torvalds wrote today on the mailing list:

"Just FYI - my current plan is that -rc7 will happen this Saturday (because I still follow the Finnish customs of Christmas _Eve_ being the important day, so Sunday I'll be off), and then if anything comes in that week - which it will do, even if networking might be offline - I'll do an rc8 the week after.

Then, unless anything odd happens, the final 6.7 release will be Jan 7th, and so the merge window for 6.8 will open Jan 8th.

So that's the plan, and it doesn't look like there's anything strange going on that would cause me to delay any further, so it's pretty likely to hold. Knock wood."

So Linux 6.7 will have an extra week to bake and there is less holiday stress now on kernel developers preparing their changes for the Linux 6.8 merge window. In turn this will mean Linux 6.8 stable will likely be out around the middle ofMarch rather than early March. This may cause issues for some spring Linux distributions that may be planning to ship with Linux 6.8 stable if it's now too close or past their kernel freeze date, but we'll see if that ends up affecting any notable distributions. In any event Linux 6.8 is already looking quite exciting with its features queued so far.