Linux 6.6-rc4 Released - Linus Torvalds: It's Fairly Small

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.6-rc4 as the newest test release for this kernel that is looking to be released as stable around the end of October.

Linux 6.6 is shaping up fairly well and Linus Torvalds described this weekly kernel release as being fairly small. He wrote in the 6.6-rc4 announcement:

"You all know the drill by now. There's nothing particularly odd in here, if you don't count a week of no networking pull as being odd. That does result in rc4 being fairly small, but I suspect we'll just see a bigger rc5 to compensate.

The GPU changes are pretty small too, so both of the big driver subsystems are being quiet, in fact.

But everything else looks very much normal. The libata suspend/resume handling shows up due to it walking away from using the generic SCSI version that caused issues. Other than that, it's a random mix of fixes all over - misc drivers and architecture fixes, some tooling and documentation, and filesystems and core kernel fixlets."

There isn't much in the way of notable fixes this week. The only fixes to cross my radar were squeezing in Intel Arrow Lake NPU support as it's just a new PCI ID and AMD Zen 1 derived Hygon CPUs now mitigating for Inception/SRSO.

Linux 6.6 in general has many exciting new features and should formally debut around the end of October or early November, depending upon how the rest of the release cycle plays out. If things stay quiet, Linux v6.6 will be out on 29 October.