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Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.15 Release Candidate
Two weeks have passed since the release of Linux kernel 6.14, and Linux 6.15’s merge window is now closed, which means that it’s time to test drive the Release Candidate (RC) development versions every Sunday until the final release in about two months from today.
Some of the highlights of the Linux 6.15 kernel series include Rust support for hrtimer, a new setcpuid= boot parameter for x86 CPUs, support for sched_ext to count and report internal events, x86 Intel and AMD PMU enhancements, nested virtualization support for VGICv3 on ARM, and support for emulating FEAT_PMUv3 on Apple Silicon.
Update
Message from Torvalds and LWN:
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LWN ☛ Linux 6.15-rc1 [LWN.net]
It's been two weeks, and the merge window is now over.
As expected, this was one of the bigger merge windows, almost certainly just because we had some pent-up development due to the previous releases being impacted by the holiday season.
That said, while it's bigger than normal, it's not some kind of record-breaking thing: we've had bigger releases, although not many. The really big releases tend to be due to some long-running major development being finally merged after many years, and this is not that: this is just the "regular" kind of big.
It's big in both number of commits and in lines changed. The stats look fairly normal, with - once again - another AMD GPU register header file drop adding a ton of lines and standing out. But while that is a big chunk in itself, it doesn't dominate the diff - there's a lot of changes all over.
As always, below is the high-level "this is what I merged" view, which gives a flavor of what's been going on, although it's obviously colored by how certain subsystems send in their development in more digestible and separate chunks, while other subsystems are less granular. So while it gives some idea of what's been going on, you'd need to look at the git tree to drill down into the particulars.
But at a high level it all looks very normal, with two thirds of the patch being driver updates, and the rest being a fairly random mix of the usual architecture updates, filesystems, core kernel (scheduling, timers, MM, networking), and misc infrastructucture (devicetree bindings, more rust infrastructure, zstd update, you name it).
Let's hope that despite the fairly sizable drop of new code, this release ends up going as smoothly as the previous ones.
Yeah, right...
Linus -
LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 6.15-rc1
Linus has released 6.15-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release. ""As expected, this was one of the bigger merge windows, almost certainly just because we had some pent-up development due to the previous releases being impacted by the holiday season. That said, while it's bigger than normal, it's not some kind of record-breaking thing."". In the end, 12.633 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline during this merge window.
Linux Magazine:
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Linux Kernel 6.15 First Release Candidate Now Available
Linux Torvalds has announced that the release candidate for the final release of the GNU/Linux 6.15 series is now available.