Kernel release status

5.17 doesn't seem to be slated to be a huge release, and everything looks fairly normal. We've got a bit more activity than usual in a couple of corners of the kernel (random number generator and the fscache rewrite stand out), but even with those things, the big picture view looks very much normal: the bulk is various driver updates, with architectures updates, documentation, and tooling being the bulk of the rest.

Note that "basic" support for case-insensitive filesystem was added to the NFS client after the 5.17-rc1 release.

Stable updates: 5.16.2, 5.15.16, 5.10.93, and 5.4.173 were released on January 20. The massive 5.16.3, 5.15.17, 5.10.94, 5.4.174, 4.19.226, 4.14.263, 4.9.298, and 4.4.300 stable updates are in the review process; they are due at any time. What does "massive" mean? It turns out that 5.16.3 broke Greg Kroah-Hartman's scripts, which were not prepared for the possibility of more than 1,000 patches in a single update.

Note that, while it has not been announced formally, the end of 4.4.x is coming and there may not be many (if any) releases after 4.4.300.