Linux kernel development boss Linus Torvalds has admitted his own “pure incompetence” led him to forget to deliver version 6.14 of the project.
Torvalds usually delivers new Linux kernel release candidates and full releases on Sunday afternoon, and documents each with a post. If he is traveling for work or pleasure, he usually gives advance notice so penguinistas don’t worry if his posts and releases don’t appear at the usual time.
His Sunday March 16th post contained no such news, instead promising “I expect to release the final 6.14 next weekend unless something very surprising happens.”
Sunday March 23rd came and went without a post.
“I'd love to have some good excuse for why I didn't do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule,” he wrote.
“I'd like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed things,” he added
“But no. It's just pure incompetence,” he confessed.
“Because absolutely nothing last-minute happened yesterday, and I was just clearing up some unrelated things in order to be ready for the merge window. And in the process just entirely forgot to actually ever cut the release. D'oh.”
Before you say “This is no way to run the development process for the most important operating system on the planet”, cool your jets: Torvalds has a decades-long track record of shepherding the kernel through hundreds of successful releases, and few users have a mission-critical need for new releases. Being late by a day is more than OK.
Among the added features in this release are more work to allow future drivers to be written in Rust – which may re-ignite recent arguments among kernel coders – support for Qualcomm’s latest and greatest mobile chip the Snapdragon 8 Elite, a fix for the GhostWrite vulnerability present in some of Alibaba subsidiary T-Head Semiconductor's RISC-V processors, and completion of work on the NTSYNC driver that will mean the WINE emulator improves its ability to run Windows code (especially games) on Linux.
You can grab the new kernel here.
Other than Torvalds forgetting to complete the release, the development effort for version 6.14 of the kernel was smooth.
Torvalds feels version 6.15 may prove more challenging.
“Judging by my pending pile of pull requests, 6.15 will be much busier,” he wrote. ®