Linux 6.8-rc2 Released & Is Now More Stable

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.8-rc2 as the newest weekly test release of this kernel set to debut as stable in March.

Linux 6.8 is looking quite exciting with the new Intel Xe experimental kernel graphics driver, more enablement for AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake / Lunar Lake, new Arm hardware support, Nintendo NSO controller support, upgrades to the Rust code, and more. With Linux 6.8-rc2, there's a few late "feature" changes plus some important stabilization work.

Torvalds noted in the 6.8-rc2 announcement:

So we had a number of small annoying issues in rc1, including an amdgpu scheduling bug that could cause a hung desktop (that would *eventually* recover, but after a long enough timeout that most people probably ended up rebooting instead. That one seems to have hit a fair number of people.

There was also a btrfs bug wrt zstd-compressed inline extents, although (somewhat) happily that wasn't in rc1 and got noticed and reverted fairly quickly, so hopefully it didn't hit very many people. It did me.

Anyway, I hope that with rc2, we're now in the more stable part of the release cycle, with those kinds of problems that might affect a lot of testers sorted out. So hopefully the fixes will be more subtle and not affect common core setups.

So go out and test. It's safe now. You trust me, right?

Linux 6.8-rc2 also includes more AMD Zen 5 IDs and AMD PMF driver human presence detection integration, Intel Clearwater Forest detection, more Bcachefs updates, and enabling -Wstringop-overflow to warn over buffer overflows, among other changes.

More Linux 6.8 kernel benchmarking to come on Phoronix in the days ahead but so far it's looking good.