Linux 6.1-rc4 Released: "Please Jump Right In, The Water Is Fine"
After Linux 6.1-rc2 was "unusually large" and Linux 6.1-rc3 continued being bigger than average, Linux 6.1-rc4 is out and fortunately it's about average in size. Things have calmed down now at the mid-point of the Linux kernel release candidate phase.
Linus Torvalds commented in today's 6.1-rc4 announcement:
So as hoped for (and expected), things seem to be starting to calm down, and rc4 is a pretty normal size for this stage in the process.
The diffstat looks fairly normal too - mostly nice and flat (so small changes spread out), with a spike for a FW update for drm/amdkfd. The other thing that stands out is some stricter xfs refcount checking and related fixes (. And some new clx tests. But even those aren't huge, they just do show up in the stats.
The shortlog doesn't look scary either. It's all the usual stuff - drivers, filesystems, architecture updates, some networking, and random small things elsewhere.
So hey, please jump right in, the water is fine. But more testing always appreciated,
Among the fixes to land in Linux 6.1-rc4 include a temporary workaround for RDNA3/GFX11 to disable GFXOFF power-savings during compute workloads, other AMD RDNA3 tweaks, various Btrfs fixes, many XFS fixes, and a variety of other fixes throughout the massive kernel codebase.
See my Linux 6.1 feature overview for a look at all the prominent changes coming with this kernel that will debut as stable in early-to-mid December. Linux 6.1 is also expected to serve as this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) release.
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