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Linus Torvalds predicts Linux Kernel 6.0 debut next week, dispels fear of delays

Hails unusually smooth development process despite travel complications

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has offered the community an optimistic prediction that version 6.0 of the project will debut next week.

Last week Torvalds felt that might not be the case.

In his September 18 State of the Kernel update, Torvalds announced release candidate six and mentioned that the 2022 Maintainers' Summit in Dublin had seen a lot of influential penguinistas spend time away from their desks.

"I am expecting rc7 to be larger than usual due to pull requests having shifted one week later, and in the worst case that might mean that I might feel like we need an extra rc8," he wrote, adding "but for now I'm going to assume it's not going to be _that_ noticeable and hope we'll just keep to the regular schedule."

His assumption has proven correct.

"So I was thinking rc7 might end up larger than usual due to travel hitting rc6, but it doesn't really seem to have happened," Torvalds wrote in this week's kernel update post.

"Yeah, maybe it's marginally bigger than the historical average for this time of the release cycle, but it definitely isn't some outlier, and it looks fairly normal. Which is all good, and makes me think that the final release will happen right on schedule next weekend, unless something unexpected happens."

Torvalds even rated the current kernel as pleasingly clean.

"Incidentally, rc7 is also (I think) the first time we have a clean 'make allmodconfig' build with no warnings from clang, since the patches for frame size problems in the amd display code got merged," he wrote. "The stack frame size is still pretty big (and the code isn't exactly pretty), but now it's below the level we warn about."

All of which points to next week being a fun time for Linux admirers, because as we have chronicled, version 6.0 of the kernel includes interesting things like more support for RISC-V and Intel's Gaudi accelerators, plus work to improve performance of Server Message Block 3 that should improve storage I/O to networked file shares.

Torvalds wrapped his post with a call to "give this one (hopefully) final week of testing, but it all looks pretty good." ®

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