Linux 5.15-rc6 Ticks Up In Size, Stops Using AMD SME By Default

Linus Torvalds is out with Linux 5.15-rc6 and its increase in size has him slightly worried.

Linus wrote in the 5.15-rc6 announcement, "I'd love to say that it's all looking average, but rc6 is actually bigger than rc5 was, and larger than normal for this time in the release cycle. It's not _enormously_ larger than normal, and it's not the largest rc6 we've had, but it's still slightly worrisome. By rc6 I really do expect things to have started calming down."

We'll see how this week plays out to see if it will be worrisome or not the rest of the cycle. The brief 5.15-rc6 announcement can be read on the kernel mailing list.

This past week saw mostly the wide assortment of fixes as usual for this stage of development. One somewhat notable change that landed this weekend is AMD SME no longer defaulting to being used on capable machines but rather needing to opt-in to that memory encryption feature. This was done to some buggy platforms that would otherwise experience boot problems with SME.

Linux 5.15 should end up either arriving on Halloween or the first weekend of November, depending upon how the rest of the month plays out.

See our Linux 5.15 feature overview for a look at the changes ahead for this new kernel.