"Ok, the last -rc obviously wasn't the last one after all, since here's a new one," noted Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc9 kernel. He continued, "enough changes that we needed another -rc, and the regression list isn't emptying fast enough either (probably because a number of people, including reporters, are vacationing)." He went on to summarize:

"The actual bulk of this all is a new UVC video driver for the standard USB Video Class specification. It's a new driver, so shouldn't cause any regressions, but it's fairly sizable [...] ie 78% is just that one new driver, and almost 92% is driver updates in general (although some of them are reverts, so they show up as diffs against -rc8, but they actually cause the _total_ diff against 2.6.25 to shrink a bit). The fs updates are partly some minor updates to 9p, ecryptfs, proc and udf, but partly some delayed cleanup patches that went through Al. Bad Al. But when Al sends me patches, I apply them. I worry what would happen if I didn't. The rest is mainly small fixes (one-liners and 'few-liners') all over the place, many of them merged from Andrew's -mm queue."

"I really don't want to do this, and I was actually hoping to release 2.6.25 last weekend (which is why -rc9 is a few days late - just me hoping to not do another -rc at all), but I've done an -rc9," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.25-rc9 kernel. "The changes in -rc9 are pretty small (shortlog appended)," he continued, "and 60% of them are m68k updates - mostly defconfigs. And some doc updates. But there's some network driver updates (tg3 and wireless hostap stand out), some late XFS patches and a mvsas driver update (the mvsas driver is new in 2.6.25, so that's not going to regress anything ;). The rest is mostly one-liners, with a few reverts going on." Linus then explained why he was putting out another release candidate:

"The reason for not doing a 2.6.25 is that some people are making noises about slab/page-alloc setup issues, and I wanted something out this week, but didn't feel comfy doing a final release.

"That said, I think I'll have to do 2.6.25 early next week regardless, because we can't just keep holding things back forever. At some point it will have to turn into a 2.6.25.x issue, and the developers with stuff pending for the next version need to be able to start merging."

"I said I was hoping that -rc8 was the last -rc, and I hate doing this, but we've had more changes since -rc8 than we had in -rc8. And while most of them are pretty trivial, I really couldn't face doing a 2.6.23 release and take the risk of some really stupid brown-paper-bag thing," Linus Torvalds said, announcing the 2.6.23-rc9 kernel. He added, "so there's a final -rc out there, and right now my plan is to make this series really short, and release 2.6.23 in a few days. So please do give it a last good testing, and holler about any issues you find!" He went on to warn developers that the first thing planned for 2.6.24 was to merge the unified x86 architecture:

"This is also a good time to warn about the fact that we're doing the x86 merge very soon (as in the next day or two) after 2.6.23 is out, so if you have pending patches for the next series that touch arch/i386 or x86-64, you should get in touch with Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar, who are the keepers of the merge scripts, and will help you prepare..

"Doing it as early as possible in the 2.6.24-rc4 series (basically I'll do it first thing) will mean that we'll have the maximum amount of time to sort out any issues, and the thing is, Thomas and Ingo already have a tree ready to go, so people can check their work against that, and don't need to think that they have to do any fixups after it his *my* tree. It would be much better if everybody was just ready for it, and not taken by surprise."