Linux 6.9-rc3 Released With Many Bcachefs Patches

Linux 6.9-rc3 is released and most notable are the Bcachefs fixes to which Torvalds quipped, "if you had a corrupted bcachefs filesystem you'd probably want this, and if you thought bcachefs was stable already, I have a bridge to sell you. Special deal only for you, real cheap." Plus various other fixes throughout.

As covered already this week on Phoronix were Linux 6.9 fixes merged for dealing with extreme file-system damage for Bcachefs and was followed by a later pull request for fixing up the repair code so it should be effectively complete and ready for robust recovery.

Linus Torvalds commented in the just-released Linux 6.9-rc3 announcement:

"Ok, so this rc3 looks a bit different than the usual ones, because there's a large series to bcachefs to do filesystem repair after corruption. Not normally something we'd see in an rc kernel, but hey, if you had a corrupted bcachefs filesystem you'd probably want this, and if you thought bcachefs was stable already, I have a bridge to sell you. Special deal only for you, real cheap.

The bcachefs part is a bit over a third of the patch, and if you ignore that part, things look fairly normal, although there's perhaps a bit more sound SoC noise than is common.

So the rest is mostly drivers (already mentioned sound, but also networking and gpu), architecture fixes (mainly x86 and s390, some arm64), some other filesystem noise (mainly smb client), some selftest updates, and a random smattering elsewhere.

It's not really all that big, although the bcachefs changes do make it bigger than typical for an rc3."

Also in Linux 6.9-rc3 is enforcing confidential computing (CoCo) VMs will panic if RdRand is broken/disabled. Much of the other fixes this week are the usual code churn for this mid-stage of the kernel cycle.

Linux 6.9 stable should be out in mid-May and is delivering on many new features. More Linux 6.9 kernel benchmarks to come on Phoronix.