Continuing in his Sunday tradition, Linus Torvalds put out the sixth release candidate to the Linux 3.17 kernel. Depending upon how the next week goes, this could be the final release candidate for Linux 3.17.

In Torvalds' brief announcement he explained, "It's been quiet - enough so that coupled with my upcoming travel, this might just be the last -rc, and final 3.17 might be next weekend. Of course, that still depends on what happens - if we have something scary coming up next week, I may have to delay things. But as it looks right now, we're all good to go."

The changes over the past week were fairly normal with just the usual regression/bug fixes for drivers, the architecture code, and file-systems. Based on the changes that were merged, Linus feels we're real close to releasing.

Torvalds' upcoming travel schedule that could complicate the 3.17 release if it's extended of the Linux 3.18 merge window is LinuxCon Europe 2014, happening in mid-October in Düsseldorf, Germany.

If you're not familiar with the Linux 3.17 kernel features, see our feature overview and there's already a lot we're looking forward to afterwards with Linux 3.18.