Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/887747/

Linus has released 5.17-rc8 rather than the
final 5.17 kernel.

Last week was somewhat messy, mostly because of embargoed patches
we had pending with another variation of spectre attacks. And
while the patches were mostly fine, we had the usual “because it
was hidden, all our normal testing automation didn’t see it
either”.

And once the automation sees things, it tests all the insane
combinations that people don’t tend to actually use or test in any
normal case, and so there was a (small) flurry of fixes for the
fixes.

None of this was really surprising, but I naïvely thought I’d be
able to do the final release this weekend anyway.

And honestly, I considered it. I don’t think we really have any
pending issues that would hold up a release, but on the other hand
we also really don’t have any reason _not_ to give it another week
with all the proper automated testing. So that’s what I’m doing,
and as a result we have an -rc8 release today instead of doing a
final 5.17.