Linux 6.0-rc7 Released - Linux 6.0 Will Hopefully Release Next Sunday

Last week Linux 6.0-rc6 came in tiny due to many of the upstream kernel developers having been in Dublin for LPC 2022 and other events. Linus Torvalds had been fearing an uptick in activity this week as a result, but he's been pleasantly surprised that Linux 6.0-rc7 remains on the lighter side.

Torvalds commented in the 6.0-rc7 announcement that just hit the wire:

So I was thinking rc7 might end up larger than usual due to travel hitting rc6, but it doesn't really seem to have happened.

Yeah, maybe it's marginally bigger than the historical average for this time of the release cycle, but it definitely isn't some outlier, and it looks fairly normal. Which is all good, and makes me think that the final release will happen right on schedule next weekend, unless something unexpected happens. Knock wood.

Incidentally, rc7 is also (I think) the first time we have a clean 'make allmodconfig' build with no warnings from clang, since the patches for frame size problems in the amd display code got merged. The stack frame size is still pretty big (and the code isn't exactly pretty), but now it's below the level we warn about.

So that's nice to see.

Anyway, full shortlog below - a lot of it is GPU and network drivers, but there's various random other fixes in there too.

Let's give this one (hopefully) final week of testing, but it all looks pretty good.

Thus barring any nasty issues from appearing in the week ahead, Linux 6.0 will be out next Sunday (2 October) rather than having to go with a 6.0-rc8 otherwise. See my Linux 6.0 feature overview to learn more about the changes ahead for this big kernel update.

Linux 6.0-rc7 is out.

After that, it's onward to the very exciting Linux 6.1 merge window where the initial Rust infrastructure should be in place, MGLRU, and many other features covered in recent weeks on Phoronix..