Linux 6.8-rc1 Released Following Torvalds' Bout With Nasty Weather

While Linux creator Linus Torvalds lost Internet and electricity amid winter storms last weekend and was without them for most of this week, he's still managed to deliver an on-time Linux 6.8-rc1 release following the two week merge window.

Linus Torvalds wrote of the merge window this evening in the 6.8-rc1 announcement:

"So this wasn't the most pleasant merge window, but most of the unpleasantness was entirely unrelated to the code base and almost entirely related to nasty weather. Just a few technical hiccups. And after a very big 6.7 release, 6.8 looks to actually be smaller than average, although not really all that significantly so.

And while maybe a bit smaller than usual (I blame the holidays), things generally look pretty normal. The bulk is driver updates (GPU and networking drivers are the big areas as always, but there's a bit of everything), but we've also got a fair chunk of filesystem updates (mainly core vfs, bcachefs, xfs and btrfs) and obviously all the usual arch updates."

Linux 6.8 brings the new experimental Intel Xe kernel graphics driver, continued work on Intel Lunar Lake enablement, new laptop/platform support, new Arm SoC support, Bcachefs improvements, an EEVDF scheduler fast path, Nintendo NSO controller support, the removal of SLAB, an upgraded Rust toolchain, the first Rust network driver, and much more as I've covered already across dozens of Phoronix articles. I'll have my usual Linux 6.8 feature overview to concisely sum up things out in the coming days.

Now onto some Linux 6.8 benchmarking...