Linux 6.2-rc6 Released & It's Suspiciously Small

Linus Torvalds just released the sixth weekly RC of Linux 6.2 and it's coming in unusually light.

After a fairly sizable Linux 6.2-rc5 and already planning to extend the Linux 6.2 release cycle by a week due to the Christmas / New Year holiday downtime, Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc6 and he's found it to be "suspiciously small" for the weekly code churn. Linus commented in the 6.2-rc6 announcement:

Here we are, one week later, and rc6 is out.

It's suspiciously small, but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth? I'll take it and hope it's not an aberration, but instead a sign that 6.2 is shaping up nicely. Call me optimistic, call me naive, but let's enjoy it and hope the trend continues.

The diffstat looks pretty normal too, with various driver fixes (networking, gpu, i2c and x86 platform drivers stand out) and netfilter fixes leading the pack. But there's the usual arch updates, random filesystem fixes, and misc other things going on too. The shortlog is appended for people who want to scan through the detailed overview.

I've already mentioned this a couple of times earlier: despite rc6 being nice and small, I expect to drag 6.2 out to an rc8 just because of the time lost to the holidays. But I'll be much happier if we can *keep* the remaining rc's nice and small. Ok?

See my Linux 6.2 feature overview to learn about all of the changes coming in this first major kernel version of 2023.

Assuming things are extended through Linux 6.2-rc8, the Linux 6.2 stable release will come out on 19 February.