Linux 6.5-rc1 Released With Initial USB4 v2 Support, Cachestat, AMD RDNA3 Overclocking

Linus Torvalds just declared the first release candidate of Linux 6.5 that also marks the end of new feature code being introduced for this cycle.

Linux 6.5 has many enhancements including the new cachestat() system call, UEFI unaccepted memory handling, initial Intel Lunar Lake audio work, initial USB4 v2 support, deprecating of the SLAB allocator, SMT and SIMD/Vector support for LoongArch, AMD RDNA3 GPU overclocking support, performance improvements for Btrfs, enhanced load balancing for Intel hybrid CPUs, and many other changes. Tomorrow I'll be out with my usual feature write-up to concisely summarize all the prominent additions and changes to find with Linux 6.5. Meanwhile Bcachefs was not merged for the Linux 6.5 cycle.

Of Linux 6.5-rc1, Linus Torvalds commented this evening in his release announcement:

"Nothing hugely unusual stands out - we had some VM annoyance, but the fixes for that don't even show in the diffstat, which is (as usual) dominated by drivers, with tooling and architecture updates a distant second and third.
...
Anyway, none of it looks hugely unusual. The biggest single mention probably goes to what wasn't merged, with the bcachefs pull request resulting in a long thread (we didn't hit a hundred emails yet, but it's not far away).

Let's calm this party down. I have this slight suspicion that this may be one of those releases that may drag out, not because there are any particular issues I expect problems with, but simply due to lot of Europe going on vacation for the month of August. But who knows... We'll see how things develop."

Now onward to some Linux 6.5 kernel testing and benchmarking.