Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc5 [LWN.net]

The 7.1-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Quoth Linus:

I'm not entirely happy about it - most of this is totally trivial stuff to random drivers, which obviously makes it all less scary, but at the same time I'm really not convinced the churn is worth it at rc5 time. These things are "fixes", sure, but at the same time a lot of them are simply so irrelevant that I think they'd be better off in a linux-next tree and get merged during the merge window.
So I think I'll start being a bit more hardnosed about this kind of unnecessary churn this late in the game. We are supposed to look for *regressions*. Non-critical fixes to long-standing issues are simply not appropriate for this late in the release cycle.
End result: this is too big, and this is the heads-up that I'll be pushing back on pointless pull requests with fixes that just aren't that important. And yes, several of these series were triggered by AI code review.

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With him on this one

Posted May 24, 2026 23:32 UTC (Sun) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

I think this makes sense.

As an end-user, I am not just looking for a system that has fewer bugs. I am looking for a system that does not add NEW bugs not present in the system I am already using. Because those are the ones that are going to cause me problems (and possibly big ones). It is too easy to make a "quick fix" that has unintended implications. The later in the RC cycle these happen, the less likely they are to be caught and fixed or excluded.

The beginning of the merge window is where you dump your backlog of fixes that you want to get into the kernel. RC5 should be fixing bugs added in RC1 or later (or things with big security implications).

Opposite of -stable maintainers requests?

Posted May 25, 2026 13:55 UTC (Mon) by jgg (subscriber, #55211) [Link] (1 responses)

I remember seeing something from the stable maintainers asking people not to let fixes sit in the -next tree and instead promptly send them to -rc?

Now Linus says let some fixes say in -next because we don't want to destablize the release.

Yet the moment rc1 comes out the stable maintainers will automatically backport all of those held back fixes to the .1 stable branch release?

Opposite of -stable maintainers requests?

Posted May 25, 2026 16:51 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

It makes much more sense this way. Issues raised during RC should be fixed during RC, no discussion. That's the point of having an RC in the first place, isn't it? Other issues should not be rushed unless you have a good case.