Following the seventh launch candidate of Linux 6.16 final week, Linus Torvalds has launched the secure model for Linux distributions to take and roll out to their customers, bringing extra {hardware} assist. Torvalds referred to as it a “good and calm” last week for the event cycle, which meant we didn’t have to see an eighth launch candidate.

Trying ahead to Linux 6.17, Torvalds has warned of a “barely chaotic” merge window as a result of in depth household journey in August for a marriage and a giant birthday. His journey schedule signifies that he will likely be away for about half a month, break up between the US and Finland. This might affect his skill to course of pull requests effectively through the second week of the merge window when vital new options are being added.

The merge window normally lasts two weeks, adopted by the primary of seven or eight launch candidates. The merge window sees main new options added earlier than testing takes place through the launch candidate interval. With all that’s happening, Torvalds needs to get as a lot finished within the first week as potential and gave common contributors a heads-up and has to this point obtained 50 pending pull requests as a result of his proactive measures.

Whereas Torvalds is doing as a lot as he can to keep away from points, he conceded that if he can’t course of all of the pull requests within the second week, he “may delay rc1 a bit simply to catch up”. He mentioned that this extension doesn’t imply leniency for late requests, so anybody seeking to submit code ought to nonetheless be immediate or face ready till Linux 6.18.

If a few of the pull requests weren’t processed through the second week, Torvalds says he could delay the discharge for a few days, so the brand new options ought to make it if submitted on time. Nevertheless, the extra hectic issues get, the larger the prospect that we see extra launch candidates.

Regardless of all this, Torvalds nonetheless believes we might nonetheless have a traditional launch window; it’s simply that issues might get delayed, and he’s offering a warning to let everybody know what’s taking place if delays happen.

With regard to Linux 6.16, most individuals ought to keep away from attempting to put in this on their Linux installations manually as there will likely be a excessive probability that it fails as a result of its low-level nature within the software program stack. For those who’re lucky, you’ll have a distribution that pushes it as an replace, however if you happen to’re on one thing slower like Ubuntu, you could be ready till the following huge distro replace.