Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux kernel, has just released the third release candidate of the upcoming Linux kernel 7.0. Torvalds recounted the fact that the second release candidate was concerningly big and put it down to random timing or “just happenstance”. Now he says that was not the case based on the fact that RC3 is also big.
Torvalds said that RC2 was one of the biggest releases in recent history and that RC3 is even bigger, which makes him think something is wrong. Torvalds’ new thesis is that Linux 6.19 got dragged out an extra week with the addition RC8 release and more features got added during the merge window and subsequent release candidates are larger as they’re fixing more items.
For the meantime, Torvalds is not worried about the size of these updates, but he is hoping that things start to calm down in the coming weeks as it could necessitate another prolonged development cycle. The main reason he has given this week for not being too worried is that a big portion of RC3 is selftests (they make up about 20% of the patch) and nothing looks particularly “scary”. He said that many of the commits in this update are trivial, mainly small cleanups or adding hardware IDs or quirks.
Among the improvements in this update is support for OneXPlayer APEX, X1z, X1 Air, and Aokzoe A2 Pro platforms. There is also support for Omen 14-fb1xxx and Victus 16-d0xxx. Several devices got additional support in this update including the ASUS G733QS, GX650RX, and FA401UM. It also brings G-Mode for M18 laptops. There are also enhancements for the Tegra238 HDA codes and Dell 14 Plus/16 Plus.
Other items in this update include bug fixes and race condition improvements that benefit the overall stability and robustness, kernel selftests and validation for display devices, network, and hardware quirks, and fixes related to use-after-free, memory leaks, and other stability issues.
A typical Linux kernel cycle runs for seven release candidates, but given the size RC2 and RC3, you should prepare to see an eighth release candidate. Once the stable version is out then Linux distributions will begin rolling it out to users, if that is their policy.