"It's been a week, and I promised to be a good boy and try to follow my release rules, so here is the next -rc," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.24-rc5 kernel. He noted:

"Things _have_ slowed down, although I'd obviously be lying if I said we've got all the regressions handled and under control. They are being worked on, and the list is shrinking, but at a guess, we're definitely not going to have a final 2.6.24 out before xmas unless santa puts some more elves to work on those regressions. So any elves out there - please keep working."

Linus added that there were no major changes in the latest release candidate, stating that because of this it wasn't worth posting a diffstat, "it only highlights a textually big PA-RISC revert, and the powerpc defconfig updates. And the Blackfin SPI driver. The rest is largely random noise in various subsystems (drivers/net, xfs filesystem, and arch updates are some of the areas that show more changes)."

Linus Torvalds announced the sixth release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel, a final release expected within the next few weeks. He noted:

"So last week was a bust, with a lot of core people away for the kernel summit, and with -rc5 having two rather nasty (and silly) one-liner problems that bit a number of people - a missing NULL pointer check in TCP, and a missing list terminator in ata_piix.

"So the fixes for those things were both pretty trivial, and they've been in the -git trees for the last few days, but I just pushed out an -rc6 that also merges up some other updates that did come in during the week."

The -rc6 source level changes can be browsed via the gitweb interface.

Linus Torvalds announced the fifth release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.23 Linux kernel noting that he was on his way to Cambridge, England, for the 2007 kernel summit. The invite-only kernel summit has been hosted in Ontario, Canada the past five years, this being the first year it has been hosted in Europe. It will happen over three days, from September 4'th through September 6'th.

Regarding 2.6.23-rc5, Linus noted, "hopefully we've addressed most regressions, so please do give it a good testing." He went on to summarize, "the shortlog and diffstat are appended: the diffstat is uglified by some powerpc defconfig updates, but otherwise it all looks pretty nice and small. The shortlog is fairly informative if you care about the details of what changed, but it does end up boiling down to 'fixing a number of generally pretty small issues'. Mostly in drivers and SCTP. So have fun, give it a go, and expect a quiet week next week."