Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc5. Although the progress at this stage does not seem to be different from usual, he announced that due to the Christmas/New Year holidays, this 5.16 cycle will be delayed longer. Torvalds stated in an announcement tonight:
So everything looks pretty normal. This RC5 may be larger than usual, but it didn’t break any records, it didn’t deliberately try to accomplish things before the holidays, and/or was just a random time effect. As for RC5, there are currently Patches are main drivers (network, sound, hid, rdma, USB…) and self-test updates (bpf, kvm and network), and the rest are fairly random improvements-file systems (CIFS, btrfs, tracefs) ), as well as the kernel and network, some fixes have also been made to the new Damon virtual address space monitoring code.
In the 5.16-rc5 announcement, he continued to point out that although things are going well, he will extend the patch cycle by one week. Originally, Linux 5.16 should be ready to be released before the end of the year, but because many developers took vacations due to Christmas and year-end celebrations, the development and testing efforts were reduced. Therefore, he proactively announced the extension of the Linux 5.16 cycle to avoid conflicts with the opening of the Linux 5.17 merge window.
Linux 5.16 will be released in early January and will introduce many new features and improvements. Except for the changes in x86 cluster-aware scheduling that have not yet been completed, Linux 5.16 is progressing well in general, except that computers with Alder Lake processors will not enable this feature by default to solve the performance degradation problem. Otherwise, everything is going well. Linus will be in Continue his daily Linux testing during the holidays and the New Year.