Linux 6.3-rc3 Released: It's "Fairly Big"

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc3 as the latest weekly test candidate for the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel that is slated to debut as stable toward the end of April.

With Linux 6.3-rc3 it's "fairly big" in terms of the latest changes as a result of more users/developers testing out the code and uncovering issues with all of the new feature code. Linus Torvalds commented in the 6.3-rc3 announcement:

"So rc3 is fairly big, but that's not hugely usual: it's when a lot of the fixes tick up as it takes a while before people find and start reporting issues.

And nothing here looks hugely worrisome. The diffstat looks a bit unusual in that there are relatively big changes to the scripts and selftest directories, but that's mainly due to the git-ignore script removal and some kvm selftest cleanups respectively. Nothing scary.

If you ignore those parts, it's a fairly standard "two thirds drivers, one third rest" thing. The drivers are all over, but networking, gpu and sound are the usual big ones, with the fbdev code showing up mainly just because of a coding style fixup to the logo conversion scripting (mainly to use proper tab indentation). The qcom interconnect driver also shows up for major cleanup and fixes.

Outside of those areas, it's a random collection of fixes: the usual arch updates (much - but not all - of it being kvm), some filesystem fixes (mainly cifs), core networking, tracing, and some core mm fixes."

One of the changes to land this week that is worth mentioning for AMD EPYC server customers (or AMD EPYC in the cloud) is throttling protection from potentially malicious guests that with Secure Encrypted Virtualization may try hammering the AMD Secure Processor via repeated requests.

See the Linux 6.3 feature overview for a look at all the prominent additions coming this kernel cycle.