Linux 7.0 RC6 released!
Linux 7.0 RC6 is now live for developers and curious users to try out. All the interesting changes from performance improvements to bug fixes have been integrated to this release candidate.
The official announcement from the kernel mailing list says:
It turns out that rc5 finally starting to calm things down this release cycle was a mirage - with rc6 we're back to many more fixes than are normal for this time in the release.
It's not like anything in here looks particularly alarming, but the fact that the rc's this release has been pretty consistently bigger than normal doesn't exactly give me the warm and fuzzies.
And it's not because the merge window was particularly big: rc1 was in fact pretty average in number of commits. It's just the rc's that have more small fixes than is the norm.
This time around, filesystems kind of stand out, with a noticeable portion of the diffstat being various filesystem or vfs fixes (ext4 and xfs leading the pack, but it's really pretty widespread).
There are obviously the usual driver fixes too: gpu, rdma, networking, sound, hwmon etc, but in the diff, drivers are "only" a third of the changes. In addition to the filesystem side, we've got core networking, architecture updates, and the rest being a random mix (rcu fixes, tooling, mm, you name it).
At the same time, while we have noticeably many more fixes than usual, most of it is very small and none of it strikes me as being very scary. A lot of pretty trivial - but real - fixes. I wonder if some of it is just AI tools being better - and we've hit some "bump" related to that.
Anyway, exactly because it's just "more than usual" rather than feeling *worse* than usual, I don't currently feel this merits extending the release, and I still hope that next weekend will be the last rc. But it's just a bit unnerving how this release doesn't want to calm down, so no promises.
Why not try out this awesome pre-release of Linux 7.0?
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