Linux 5.17-rc7 Released - Final Kernel Planned For Next Weekend

Barring any last minute issues the Linux 5.17 stable kernel is expected to be out next Sunday.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc7 as the newest weekly release candidate. Torvalds summed up this week's kernel activity as "the usual number of small fixes all over - with btrfs standing out once again. But once again it's not like it's a lot of changes, it's just that the rest tends to be pretty small. "The rest" in this case is mostly networking (drivers but also some core fixes), misc other drivers (gpu and input, with some noise elsewhere) and arch updates (mostly devicetree and some kvm fixes, but also RISC-V and s390)."

So as long as nothing serious comes up within the kernel this coming week and the world is still standing come next weekend, Linux 5.17 final is expected to be out and in turn the start of the Linux 5.18 merge window. Otherwise a Linux 5.17-rc8 would be issued in pushing the kernel into overtime for an extra week.

See our Linux 5.17 feature overview for a look at all of the exciting changes coming with this kernel.