Progress on Linux 4.10 has to date been steady. So steady, in fact, that it's not been worth reporting.

But that changed on Sunday when Linus Torvalds declared that release candidate six, a previously “small and calm release candidate somehow blew up to not be all that small after all.”

Torvalds isn't panicking because he's seen this all before.

“It's not like this is a new pattern,” he wrote on the Linux Kernel Mailing list,” because “people end up pushing me their work for the week on Friday, and that's been going on for a few years by now, and I've mentioned it before. It was just even more noticeable than usual.”

The culprit? A late set of pull requests that came in Friday (with a couple this weekend) pushed rc6 to be the biggest rc so far during this release cycle (that's obviously not counting rc1).”

While rc6 is not a whopper, Torvalds finds it “a bit distressing” because he was keen on having rc6 be the last for Linux 4.10. Now he feels rc7 is a certainty and the rc8 that he unhappily issued for Linux 4.8 and 4.9 looks likely.

“I really want things to calm down” so that rc7 is the last release candidate, Torvalds wrote. But his post doesn't ooze confidence that this release of the Linux Kernel has much chance of being settled in the next seven days.

GPU and networking were the main reasons that this rc blew out. ®