Linux 6.3-rc4 Released: "Looking Pretty Normal"

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.3-rc4 as we reach around the half-way point of the Linux 6.3 kernel's development cycle.

Torvalds wrote in today's 6.3-rc4 announcement:

"Things are looking pretty normal for this time of the release process. All the stats look very regular, and the diffstat mostly does too.

I say "mostly", just because we had a bunch of xfs fixes last week, which makes the diffstat skew that way more than usual. But even that is mainly for a self-test addition. The actual code changes are much smaller.

So instead of the usual 50+% drivers, the rc4 diffstat is about "one third drivers, one third filesystems, one third rest". Not all of the filesystem stuff is xfs, of course - we have cifs, btrfs and ksmbd fixes too.

On the driver side, it's a mix, but networking and gpu shows up as usual. With USB and thunderbolt fixes showing up, and the rest being fairly random.

And "the rest" is all the normal stuff. Self-tests, core networking, architecture updates, nothing odd there.

Let's hope things stay normal. And, as normal, testing and reporting issues is appreciated,"

Besides what Linus mentioned, there isn't much worth mentioning in terms of the individual patches landing this week. One item covered earlier today on Phoronix is Linux now only randomizing per-CPU entry area when booting with KASLR active.

See the Linux 6.3 feature list for an overview of all the interesting changes coming in this kernel. Linux 6.3 stable should be out around the end of April, depending upon how the back-half of the kernel cycle plays out.