Torvalds insists that developers submit their code in a timely manner

Linus Torvalds released the seventh version candidate (RC) Linux kernel 6.1 on Sunday and Linux 6.1-rc7 is expected to be the penultimate release candidate before the official release of Linux 6.1, probably on December 11.

Furthermore, Torvalds reminded contributors that the pace of the kernel development cycle will increase during Christmas and therefore urged developers to submit their work for the next kernel version, Linux 6.2, before the holidays. Torvalds' announcement also indicates that Linux 6.1 has seen an increase in changes this cycle, while he prefers the patch flow to slow down.

Torvalds has been hesitant in recent weeks to extend the development cycle Linux 6.1 for another week. As it stands, it's leaning towards releasing Linux 6.1-rc8 next week before releasing the stable Linux 6.1 kernel the following week.

So the stable version of Linux 6.1 will be released on December 11, unless next week is extremely quiet, which would lead Torvalds to jump straight to 6.1. On Sunday, Torvalds made some comments in the post announcing the latest release of the candidate kernel, Linux 6.1-rc7. "It's been another week," he said he:

“It started out smoothly, and I was pretty sure that the fact that it was Thanksgiving week here in the United States meant it would go on smoothly as well. But he was wrong.

And is that the creator of the Linux kernel has noticed a peculiar "habit" by the developers and it is that at the end of the week again: "People send me their things on Fridays."

He mentions that this barely slowed people down. Therefore, this week's statistics are almost identical to those of the previous two weeks. And it's not just the statistics, everything is very similar.

There's really nothing to worry about, except that it's a little more than I'm comfortable with. I should have slowed down more now."

"As a result, I'm now pretty sure this is going to be one of those 'we'll have one more week and I'll do an rc8-type release.' Which means the next merge window will be during the holiday season. Does not matter. It is what it is," Torvalds added in the post. Due to these findings and the workload that would have been placed on him during the week, Torvalds issued a warning about the upcoming merger window. He notified contributors that he will simply "ignore" pull requests that are "late" and consider them for the next merge window.

This means I'll be more adamant than usual for the next merge window: the usual rule is that things sent to me for the merge window should be ready _before_ the merge window opens. But since the merge window largely takes place during the holiday period, I'm going to enforce this rule pretty strictly. I want to see all the work done on change requests *before* the holidays, not while you're drinking your eggnog and stressing about the season,” he warned. Torvalds said he'll be tough on it.

“If I get overdue pull requests, I'll just say, 'it can wait.' OKAY ? Now, I suspect that everyone else _wants to get their work done before the holidays, too, so I hope we're all in violent agreement on this. However, I thought I had to start raising awareness about it,” she added. Among the many other Linux kernel bug fixes over the past week, it's worth noting that Linux 6.1-rc7 now allows users to more easily switch from the AMD P-State driver to the ACPI CPUFreq driver.

This It is not the first time that Torvalds has urged taxpayers to be more "proactive" in kernel development.

Last month, when he released the first release candidate of Linux 6.1 (Linux 6.1-rc1), Torvalds made a call to the developers so that «make your life easier by adding code earlier in the development cycle«. He urged all developers to prepare the code they want to add to the new kernel version before the merge window opens. According to Torvalds, this approach saves you from having a lot to do at the end of a merge window.

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