A fifth release candidate for Linux kernel version 7.1 was announced, and it was described as unusually large. The kernel maintainer expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of trivial churn arriving at rc5 time, especially changes to random drivers that add complexity when work is near completion. The usual development process includes a two-week submission window followed by release candidates intended to move toward stability. Many late changes were characterized as irrelevant and better suited for a separate integration path during the merge window. Some series were triggered by AI code review. The maintainer said the focus should be on regressions, not non-critical fixes to long-standing issues, and indicated stricter pushback on unnecessary submissions.
"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. And yes, several of these series were triggered by AI code review. 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. He then declared rc5 "too big" and said his post"
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