#computers

Linux 7.0 RC4 released!

Linux 7.0 RC4 is now live for developers and curious users to try out. All the interesting changes from performance improvements to bug fixes have been integrated to this release candidate.

The official announcement from the kernel mailing list says:

So last week looked very calm - for a few days.

Then Thursday hit with the networking pull. And then on Friday everybody else decided to send in their work for the week, with a few more trickling in over the weekend. End result: what had for a short few days looked like a nice calm week turned into another "bigger than usual" release candidate.

To be fair, that "almost everything comes in at the end of the week" is 100% normal, and none of this is surprising. I was admittedly hoping that things would start to calm down, but that was not to be.

I no longer really believe that it was the one extra week we had last release cycle: I'm starting to suspect it's the psychological result of "hey, new major number", and people are just being a bit more active as a result.

It's been fairly consistent: while -rc1 was a fairly normal size at 11.5k commits (not counting merges), we have now have rc2..rc4 all being just a bit larger than usual. Not by a _huge_ amount, by any means, but enough to be noticeable.

Anyway, while the numbers are a bit larger than is typical for this stage in the release, it all looks fairly small and benign. For example, once again the selftest updates show up fairly noticeable in the diffstat, and the actual kernel diffs look mostly pretty flat and spread out - so it may be a fair amount of commits, but it's mostly
all small stuff.

Why not try out this awesome pre-release of Linux 7.0?