Linux 6.8-rc6 Released: This Kernel May Need An Extra Week For Testing

The Linux 6.8 kernel continues coming together well and the v6.8-rc6 milestone is now available for testing. If all goes well Linux 6.8 will debut as stable in two weeks but with how things are currently pacing could end up being three weeks.

Notable with this week's release candidate is Nouveau support for optionally enabling GSP usage by default for RTX 20 (Turing) series and newer NVIDIA GPUs when the necessary GSP firmware is present on the system. This can be used for Linux distributions to optionally allow NVIDIA GPU System Processor use by default moving forward.

On the Nouveau side for Linux 6.8-rc6 is also new ioctls now used by the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver for ReBAR support.

Merged today for Linux 6.8 was delaying VERW clearing on return to user-space for better dealing with side channel vulnerability protections such as for Intel MDS. This week also saw a fix land for addressing suspend/resume on the Framework 13 AMD laptop. There are also some Bcachefs fixes too.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.8-rc6 announcement:

"Last week I said that I was hoping things would calm down a bit. Technically things did calm down a bit, and rc6 is smaller than rc5 was. But not by a huge amount, and honestly, while there's nothing really alarming here, there's more here than I would really like at this point in the release.

So this may end up being one of those releases that get an rc8. We'll see. The fact that we have a bit more commits than I would really wish for might not be a huge issue when a noticeable portion of said commits end up being about self-tests etc.

So right now I'm still on the fence about things. Most of the stuff here is really just fairly trivial driver updates (and those self-test ones), but we do have regressions being tracked still, so..."

So we'll see how things are looking if Linux 6.8 will be ready for release after next week's 6.8-rc7 and in turn debuting as stable on 10 March otherwise if the extra release candidate is needed could end up debuting on 6.8-rc8. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS among other upcoming Linux distro releases are hoping to use Linux 6.8.

See our Linux 6.8 feature overview for a look at all the new hardware support, performance optimizations, and other new kernel features being rolled out with Linux 6.8 due for release in March.