Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.7 Release Candidate
The biggest change in Linux kernel 6.7 is the implementation of the bcachefs file system, a copy-on-write (COW) file system for Linux-based operating systems, which is designed to compete with the modern features offered by the Btrfs and ZFS file systems while having the speed and performance of the EXT4 and XFS file systems.
Linux kernel 6.7 also promises support for NVIDIA’s GSP firmware in the Nouveau open-source graphics driver, which will be used only on hardware where GSP (GPU System Processor) isn’t supported while being optional on hardware where it’s already supported.
Update (by Roy)
Original message by LT:
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Linux 6.7-rc1
So here we are, two weeks after the merge window opened, and 6.7-rc1 is out, and the merge window is closed.
In number of commits, this is the biggest merge window we've ever had, with 15.4k non-merge commits. That is quite a bit bigger than the previous biggest releases (4.9, 5.8 and 5.13) that all weighted in at about 14.2k non-merge commits.
Now, part of that is obviously the bcachefs merge, which brought in a lot of commits because it included the full history. But 6.7 is pretty big in other ways too, with
12678 files changed, 838819 insertions(+), 280754 deletions(-)
which is also bigger than those historically big releases. And that's not due to bcachefs, that's actually mainly due to ia64 removal and a lot of GPU support (notably lots of AMD GPU header files again - lots and lots of lines, but there's support for new nvidia cards too).
But there's changes all over, even if they may not stand out quite as much in the diffstats or the commit numbers.
Below is my merge log, which gives a hint of the big picture changes,
Linus
LWN:
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Kernel prepatch 6.7-rc1
Linus Torvalds has released 6.7-rc1, thus closing the merge window for this release. It is the largest merge window ever, but some of that was due to the bcachefs history that came with merge of that filesystem.