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Linux 7.0-rc6
posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 30, 2026,
updated Mar 30, 2026
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It turns out that rc5 finally starting to calm things down this
release cycle was a mirage - with rc6 we're back to many more fixes
than are normal for this time in the release.
It's not like anything in here looks particularly alarming, but the
fact that the rc's this release has been pretty consistently bigger
than normal doesn't exactly give me the warm and fuzzies.
And it's not because the merge window was particularly big: rc1 was in
fact pretty average in number of commits. It's just the rc's that
have more small fixes than is the norm.
This time around, filesystems kind of stand out, with a noticeable
portion of the diffstat being various filesystem or vfs fixes (ext4
and xfs leading the pack, but it's really pretty widespread).
There are obviously the usual driver fixes too: gpu, rdma, networking,
sound, hwmon etc, but in the diff, drivers are "only" a third of the
changes. In addition to the filesystem side, we've got core
networking, architecture updates, and the rest being a random mix (rcu
fixes, tooling, mm, you name it).
At the same time, while we have noticeably many more fixes than usual,
most of it is very small and none of it strikes me as being very
scary. A lot of pretty trivial - but real - fixes. I wonder if some of
it is just AI tools being better - and we've hit some "bump" related
to that.
Anyway, exactly because it's just "more than usual" rather than
feeling *worse* than usual, I don't currently feel this merits
extending the release, and I still hope that next weekend will be the
last rc. But it's just a bit unnerving how this release doesn't want
to calm down, so no promises.
Linus
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The 7.0-rc6 kernel prepatch is out...
