Linux 6.9-rc7 Released: The Kernel Is Looking Good

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc7 and it's looking good like the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will hopefully be out next Sunday.

Torvalds' 6.9-rc7 announcement sums up the week as being in good shape for this late stage of the cycle and nothing out of the ordinary being raised:

"The stats for 6.9 continue to look very normal, and nothing looks particularly alarming.

Most of the changes are to drivers, as is proper and tradition. Sound stands out, but not in some scary way, and we've got the usual DRM updates and various random other subsystems (usb, pincontrol, networking, nvme..).

Outside of drivers it's mostly random other smaller changes: filesystems (erofs and tracefs), some arch updates (mostly x86, but a smattering of fixes elsewhere too), some documentation updates, small core networking fixes, and some selftests."

So hopefully next Sunday, 12 May, will see the stable Linux 6.9 kernel as opposed to needing a Linux 6.9-rc8 release... We'll see!

Besides bug/regression fixes with Linux 6.9-rc7 are a few new device IDs being added this week.

Linux 6.9 features include larger console fonts for modern displays, Intel FRED, AMD Preferred Core with their P-State driver, the DM Virtual Data Optimizer landing, and much more.