Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.3 Release Candidate
The two-week merge window for Linux kernel 6.3 opened automatically with the release of Linux 6.2, and now, the first Release Candidate (RC) development version is available for early adopters, distro maintainers, and bleeding-edge users who want to get a glimpse of what’s about to be included in the final release.
As expected, Linux kernel 6.3 will introduce several new features and improvements, as well as new and updated drivers for better hardware support.
Update (by Roy)
Message from Torvalds:
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Linux 6.3-rc1
So after several releases where the merge windows had something odd going on, we finally had just a regular "two weeks of just merge window". It was quite nice.
In fact, it was quite nice in a couple of ways: not only didn't I have a hugely compressed merge window where I felt I had to cram as much as possible into the first few days, but the fact that we _have_ had a couple of merge windows where I really asked for people to have everything ready when the merge window opened seems to have set a pattern: the bulk of everything really did come in early.
And again, that just makes the merge window work nicer for me, when I don't sit there waiting, knowing that there's stuff pending that just hasn't had a pull request done yet.
So it all felt rather good. Of course, the fact that I had no machine issues, no holidays, and no travel coming up, then meant that I may have noticed a few more of the "people, please write good commit messages for merges" issues, so there's a possible downside to me not being as hurried as the last few merge windows have been.
And of course, smooth or not, now that the merge window is closed, we need to make sure it all *works*. We had a couple of exciting merges already, and I think the fallout from that got sorted out, but I'm sure there's more to come. Let's hope the calming-down period of 6.3 works as well as the merge window did... Knock wood.
Anyway, as always, the shortlog is much too large to post, since we had 12500+ commits (and that's not counting the merges - closer to a thousand of those). So below is just my usual merge log which gives only a very high-level view of what I merged and from who. It all looks fairly normal, with ~55% of the patch being drivers, ~20% being architecture updates. and the rest being the usual random mix (documentation, tooling, networking, filesystem, and just core kernel stuff).
Please do test,
Linus