Linus Torvalds told the world that if it wanted a new Linux he needed a quiet week. But he didn't get it and now the world has an eighth release candidate of Linux 4.9 to consider.

The Linux Lord's weekly what's up with Linux post says “things haven't been bad, but it also hasn't been the complete quiet that would have made me go 'no point in doing another week'.”

Torvalds deemed 163 small fixes, plus a number of merges, an unacceptable level of “noise” during the last week. The assortment of “networking (error path leaks stand out, but it's a random collection) and random drivers, with a couple of small fixes to core stuff” mean he reckons we need one last look at 4.9 before it gets the Penguinista Seal of Approval.

If Linux 4.9 does indeed emerge next week, it likely means 4.10 will have an unusually long development cycle as the merge window ahead of each new version generally runs to two weeks. If 4.9 emerges on December 11th, that would mean the merge window closes on December 25th.

Readers will probably be aware that's not a day on which much work gets done in an awful lot of nations and that the next week or two are also far from the planet's peak productivity periods. It's therefore conceivable we may have to do without Linux 4.10 until March 2017. ®