As we approach the stable Linux 6.16 kernel release later this month, Linux 6.16-rc6 is out today as the newest weekly test candidate.
With the just-released Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel there is the patches for the Transient Scheduler Attacks mitigations that were made public this week and affecting AMD Zen 3 / Zen 4 processors. The Transient Scheduler Attacks “TSA” kernel code was already back-ported to the stable Linux kernel versions and is now part of the 6.16-rc6 tag too after landing in Git this past Tuesday.
Linux 6.16-rc6 on the AMD side also fixes issues with some AMD Zen 2 cores in Cyan Skillfish that weren’t even supposed to run on Linux.
On the Intel side, the Linux 6.16-rc6 MAINTAINERS file is updated to reflect a high profile Intel Linux engineer leaving the company after 14 years and thus shifting work over from his Intel email address to his personal Kernel.org email address.
Linux 6.16-rc6 also brings some Bcachefs fixes, including for some high severity regressions.
Plus in Linux 6.16-rc6 is an assortment of other bug/regression fixes for the week.
If all goes well Linux 6.16 stable could be out two weeks from today on 27 July. There are many exciting features and changes with Linux 6.16.
Update: Linus Torvalds is now out with his 6.16-rc6 announcement:
“So I had a little scare this week, noticing some odd instability on
Thursday, and basically then lost a day to trying to figure that whole
thing out. The fix ended up being a simple revert in the end, but for
a while there I was getting “Uh-oh, we’re in trouble” vibes, because I
had trouble reproducing the issue consistently, and it wasn’t at all
obvious even what subsystem had broken things.So I was flailing around blaming everybody and their pet hamster,
because for a while it looked like a drm issue and then a netlink
problem (it superficially coincided with separate issues with both of
those subsystems).But I did eventually figure out how to trigger it reliably and then it
bisected nicely, and a couple of days have passed, and I’m feeling
much better about the release again. We’re back on track, and despite
that little scare, I think we’re in good shape.Below you’ll find the shortlog for the week – no real pattern stands
out. It’s random fixes spread out fairly evenly, so we’ve got a bit of
everything: drivers, arch fixes, filesystems, networking, tooling,
documentation.We’ve got a couple more weeks to go for this release, let’s hope they
go more smoothly than the last one. But please do keep testing,”