Linux 6.9-rc6 Released With This Kernel Looking "Pretty Normal"

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc6 as the latest weekly test release of Linux 6.9 as it works toward its stable release by mid-May.

So far things are looking good this cycle with Linus Torvalds commenting in the 6.9-rc6 announcement:

"Things continue to look pretty normal, and nothing here really stands out. The biggest single change that stands out in the diffstat is literally a documentation update, everything else looks pretty small and spread out.

We have the usual driver updates (mainly networking and gpu but some updates elsewhere), some filesystem updates (mainly smb, bcachefs, nfsd reverts, and some ntfs compat updates), and misc other fixes all over - wifi fixes, arm dts fixlets, yadda yadda."

Among the fixes landing this week were correcting the default CPU security mitigations for non-x86 architectures following a regression a few weeks ago, more AMD Zen 5 CPU models now being recognized, and more Bcachefs file-system fixes.

See the Linux 6.9 feature overview for a look at all the exciting changes coming in this May stable kernel debut. More Linux 6.9 kernel benchmarking is ongoing at Phoronix.