"It hasn't been a week, I know, and this is a pretty small set of changes since -rc7, but I'm going to be mostly incommunicado for the next week or so, so I just released what will hopefully be the last -rc," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc8 kernel. He added, "or maybe not. It depends on how good you all are while I'm not looking." Regarding the latest release candidate, Linus explained:

"Most of the bulk of the changes here are to Xen and to KVM in particular, which shows up as a rather unusual dirstat: 65% is in arch/x86 (counting the asm-x86 changes too). The rest is mostly random stuff, the appended ShortLog gives a reasonable idea. Several bugzilla entries are hopefully now closed."

"No cute April 1st shenanigans, just a regular -rc release that happened to come up today because I was waiting for the input layer oops-fixes to be ready and tested," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc8 kernel on April 1st. He continued, "the bulk of the fixes are the usual random one-liners. [...] A lot of the one-liners are some sparse cleanups, which is probably unnecessary noise at this point, but when Al sends me a series I just tend to apply it because his patches tend to be rather careful and basically always correct." Linus added:

"The big thing that is actually *noticeable* to most people is that this should fix the two top regressions: we've had some suspend-resume regressions due to the stupid ACPI _PTS ordering issues, and while the cleanups were left, the ordering changes were reverted. So that should fix issues for some people (of course, the people who had it fixed are unhappy, but regressions are worse). The other thing that bit a number of people and is now fixed (and that also probably often showed up as a suspend/resume regression) was some 'struct device' lifetime changes that broke the input layer. Thanks to people who debugged that one."

"I do hate doing -rc's for so long, but I hate releasing when not feeling it's simmered enough even more. And the changes since -rc7 are bigger than the changes between -rc6 and -rc7 were (partly probably because people were still on vacation between -rc6 and -rc7, so we had something of a small trickle come in afterwards)," Linus Torvalds began, explaining why he posted another release candidate rather than the official 2.6.24 kernel. He continued, "that said, the changes here really aren't that big, and the shortlog is fairly boring. So I'm pretty sure this is the last -rc, and the final 2.6.24 will probably be out next weekend or so. But in the meantime, let's give this a final shakedown, and see if we can fix any last regressions still." Linus went on to summarize the changes:

"Drivers, networking, some arch updates, and ACPI. A fair number of really small commits. I honestly can't really improve on the appended shortlog - there isn't any over-arching theme, except for 'lots of small boring fixes'. Which is as it should be, of course."

"Ok, I think I'm getting close to releasing a real 2.6.23," began Linus Torvalds in his release announcement for the eighth release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel. "Things seem to have calmed down, and I think Thomas Gleixner may have found the suspend/resume regression that has dogged us for a while, so I'm feeling happy about things." Linus continued:

"Of course, me feeling happy is usually immediately followed by some nasty person finding new problems, but I'll just ignore that and enjoy the feeling anyway, however fleeting it may be.

"The shortlog really is pretty short, and I'm appending the diffstat at the end too in case anybody cares, but basically it's just a number of fairly small but real fixes, with some support for a few new chips to the sky2 network driver.."