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Linux 7.1-rc5
posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 25, 2026
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To the surprise of absolutely nobody by now, rc5 is pretty big. Quite
a bit bigger than rc5's have traditionally been.
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.
Because fixes or not - and trivial or not - these kinds of large rc
weeks are *not* conducive to long-term stability. Trivial fixes may
be trivial, and have a pretty low chance of causing problems, but "low
chance" is still not "zero chance".
So people: start looking closer at your pull requests, and ask
yourself: "Is this really a regression or serious enough that it
shouldn't just go into the development pile?".
Linus
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The 7.1-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. [...]
