Linux 6.7-rc1 Released With NVIDIA GSP & Bcachefs While Itanium IA-64 Retired

After a very exciting two weeks, the merge window for Linux 6.7 is now wrapped up and Linus Torvalds has published Linux 6.7-rc1 as the first release candidate leading up to the stable release around the end of the calendar year.

The Linux 6.7 merge window was very exciting and in fact the largest feature merge window both on a commit basis as well as in the lines of code added and removed. Linux 6.7 adds the new Bcachefs experimental file-system, initial NVIDIA GSP support for the Nouveau driver to improve RTX 20 series and newer support, the Intel Itanium (IA-64) architecture was removed from the mainline kernel, more early enablement work on Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, and much more. Stay tuned for my more exhaustive Linux 6.7 feature overview to be published in the next day or two.

In today's Linux 6.7-rc1 announcement, Linus Torvalds commented:

"In number of commits, this is the biggest merge window we've ever had, with 15.4k non-merge commits. That is quite a bit bigger than the previous biggest releases (4.9, 5.8 and 5.13) that all weighted in at about 14.2k non-merge commits.

Now, part of that is obviously the bcachefs merge, which brought in a lot of commits because it included the full history. But 6.7 is pretty big in other ways too."

Stay tuned for my Linux 6.7 feature overview and following up with various Linux 6.7 kernel benchmarks over the coming days and weeks on Phoronix.