Last week Linus Torvalds suggested Linux kernel developers should hurry up and calm things down, because he worried that version 4.10 might take longer than he wanted to complete.

And this week he's all-but recanted that request, because he thinks he may not have time to finish the job.

“Hey, look at that,” Torvalds wrote on the Linux Kernel mailing list, “it's all been very quiet, and unless anything bad happens, we're all back to the regular schedule with this being the last rc.”

“Of course, when I actually looked at my calendar, I realized that if that actually happens, the next merge window will be awkward for me due to travel, so it turns out that I should never have hoped for things calming down in the first place. But I've done merge windows during travels before, so it's not like it would necessarily be a big problem.”

But Torvalds hasn't indicated whether he plans to get the job done or let things roll for another week. Which is what you get when you – completely successfully – let one person oversee the development of arguably the world's most important operating system.

“It's all fairly small,” Torvalds wrote, “and nothing particularly stands out (apart from me being reminded once more about how much I hate modversions - we hit another random architecture-specific tooling bug that was triggered by it).”

Torvalds rates this week's release candidate, the seventh for Linux 4.10, as “pretty small” and says it is “about half … driver fixes, 20% arch updates and the rest is 'misc': filesystems, generic networking, VM, genksyms scripting etc.” ®