Ubuntu 23.10 Planning To Ship With The Linux 6.5 Kernel

This shouldn't be particularly surprising for those closely tracking release cycles and the Linux kernel release cadence, but now it's official: Ubuntu 23.10 is aiming to ship with the Linux 6.5 kernel.

The Linux 6.5 kernel merge window just ended and the stable release should be here around the end of August. Linux 6.5 will be the latest stable release in time for the Ubuntu 23.10 release on 12 October. The Linux 6.6 stable kernel meanwhile will drop roughly around that time but would be past the various development deadlines and too close to the 23.10 release to incorporate. So as we've been expecting, Ubuntu 23.10 is targeting to ship the Linux 6.5 kernel.

This will be a nice upgrade over Linux 6.2 currently shipped by Ubuntu 23.04. There is a lot that has been upstreamed over the past number of months and covered across numerous Phoronix articles. Though one issue that does come to mind is that at least for upstream Linux 6.5, the Intel Meteor Lake graphics support isn't yet promoted to stable / enabled out-of-the-box. With Meteor Lake laptops expected later this year, it will be interesting to see if Canonical ends up patching any MTL extras in and enabling that by default to improve the out-of-the-box experience for next-gen Intel laptops.

Confirmation of the Linux 6.5 plans for Ubuntu 23.10 were posted a few minutes ago to the Ubuntu Discourse. Those wanting to easily test a Linux 6.5 Git kernel today on an existing Ubuntu install can use the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Daily archive to access DEB packages of the daily Git kernel state.