Linus Torvalds Announces the First Linux Kernel 6.8 Release Candidate
The two-week merge window for Linux kernel 6.8 opened automatically with the release of Linux 6.7, and now, it’s closed, which means that the first Release Candidate (RC) development version is available for early adopters, distro maintainers, and bleeding-edge users.
According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 6.8 looks to be a small release that promises mostly updated drivers for graphics and networking, but also filesystem updates, mostly for bcachefs, XFS, Btrfs, and VFS, as well as architecture, tooling, mm, networking, core kernel, and documentation updates.
An update (by Roy)
From LWN and the original message:
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Kernel prepatch 6.8-rc1
The 6.8-rc1 kernel prepatch is out for testing.
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Linux 6.8-rc1
So this wasn't the most pleasant merge window, but most of the unpleasantness was entirely unrelated to the code base and almost entirely related to nasty weather. Just a few technical hiccups. And after a very big 6.7 release, 6.8 looks to actually be smaller than average, although not really all that significantly so.
And while maybe a bit smaller than usual (I blame the holidays), things generally look pretty normal. The bulk is driver updates (GPU and networking drivers are the big areas as always, but there's a bit of everything), but we've also got a fair chunk of filesystem updates (mainly core vfs, bcachefs, xfs and btrfs) and obviously all the usual arch updates.
The rest is all over: docs, tooling, core kernel, mm and networking. My mergelog below gives some kind of high-level overview.
Let the testing and calming down begin,
Linus