Linux 5.13-rc6 Released With The Kernel Cycle Smoothing Out

After several weeks worth of 5.13-rc releases where there were more changes than Linus Torvalds would like to see, Linux 5.13-rc6 is out now and it's on the smaller side while panning out nicely for this later stage of kernel development.

Torvalds commented in the 5.13-rc6 announcement, "Most of the diff by far is drivers (usb, gpu, regulator, rdma, spi, pinctrl, scsi..), with just a few other areas: some x86 fixes (mainly kvm), some RISC-V ones, tiny btrfs and nfs client fixes, a couple of core kernel (scheduler, tracing) fixes. It's all really pretty small. Let's hope the trend continues, and we'll have a nice timely 5.13 release. But please do keep testing and verifying."

Among the changes this week to land is a fix to allow controlling the second fan on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9. There is also a performance regression fix for a memory management issue that was in the kernel since the end of 2020 but only noticed by Intel's test bot in late May.

Linux 5.13 should be out around the end of June or the first week of July, depending upon how things look over the next two weeks. See our Linux 5.13 feature overview for more details on this summer 2021 kernel.