The latest stable version of the Linux kernel came after an eighth Release Candidate to finish polishing everything. What has met the deadlines, something different would be a great surprise, is the launch from Linux 5.13-rc1. After a stable release, the fusion window is entered, there is a weekend without any release and then the first RC arrives, something that has already happened and within expectations.
Torvalds explains that unsurprisingly the fusion window has been quite large, but everything went smoothly, to which he adds a “famous last words” that makes two things clear: one, that lately nothing really serious is happening in the development of the Linux kernel; and two, that the famous Finnish developer would not be nervous even if he worked with his house on fire.
Linux 5.13-rc1, all normal
Unsurprisingly, this is a fairly large merge window, but things seem to have run smoothly. Famous last words. There’s a lot in there, although the diffstat seems quite skewed – again due to some amdgpu header files. Those things are huge, and they self-generate from the hardware descriptions, and the end result is that they often end up overshadowing all other changes if you just look at the differences. In fact, more than a third of the diff for 5.13-rc1 is just that type of header files.
If there are no surprises as in 5.12, Linux 5.13 will be released on June 27, a week later if it requires the eighth Release Candidate and two weeks later if a tragedy occurs and requires an rc9 that Torvalds claims he has released, but that I personally do not remember seeing. Ubuntu users who want to install it when the time comes will have to do it on their own, since Canonical does not update the kernel until a new version of its operating system is released.
