Linux 6.1-rc3 Released - A Bit Larger Than Average

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.1-rc3 as the third weekly test release of the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel.

After Linux 6.1-rc2 wound up being unusually large, Torvalds described this evening's 6.1-rc3 release as:

I know I said last week that rc2 was unusually large. It turns out that rc3 is almost exactly the same size. But at least for an rc3 release, that bigger size is a bit more normal: this is when people are starting to find problems and send in fixes for them.

So while rc2 was just _way_ bigger than usual, rc3 is only a bit larger than an average rc3 release is. But it's still on the largish side. I hope that things start calming down, and we'll start seeing the size of these rc's shrink. Please?

Unlike rc2, there's no one single reason for the bulk of the rc3 changes. They're pretty much all over, with the usual distribution - drivers dominating (networking, gpu and sound are most noticeable, but there's a little bit of everything).

Among the fixes found this week for Linux 6.1-rc3 include picking up some lingering Intel Raptor Lake device IDs,

See all the patches this week via the 6.1-rc3 announcement, Torvalds concluded it with, "while it isn't small, nothing looks particularly worrisome or strange..."

See my Linux 6.1 feature list for a look at all the notable features coming with Linux 6.1, which will be released in early December. So far I haven't hit any significant performance regressions in my Linux 6.1 benchmarking but more tests are still pending.