Linux 6.2-rc3 Released - "Starting To Look A Lot More Normal"

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.2-rc3 a few hours early today and noted that things are "starting to look a lot more normal" in terms of the code churn for this stage of the Linux 6.2 development cycle now that the holiday period has passed.

Now that the end-of-year Christmas and New Year's holidays are over, kernel developers are getting back into the grind as are testers and others involved in the Linux kernel development. For the material over the past week for Linux 6.2-rc3, Torvalds commented:

Here we are, another week done, and things are starting to look a lot more normal after that very quiet holiday week that made rc2 so very small.

Nothing in particular here stands out: the bulk of this is driver fixes (networking, gpu, block, virtio - but also usb, fbdev, rdma etc, so a little bit of everything). That is as should be, and just matches where the bulk of the code is.

Outside of the various driver fixes, we've got core networking, some filesystem fixes (btrfs, cifs, f2fs and nfs), and some perf tooling work.

See the 6.2-rc3 announcement for the full list of patches merged over the past week.

There were some graphics driver fixes for Intel and AMD to be merged this week, support with Intel's RAPL code for Emerald Rapids and Meteor lake was added, some memory leak fixes, and other random churn throughout the kernel.

See my Linux 6.2 feature overview for all the big changes to be found in this kernel that will release as stable in February.