Linus Torvalds just tagged Linux 6.16-rc5 as the newest test release of Linux 6.16.
Among the changes this week on my radar were a performance regression being fixed in the Futex code by disabling a new feature for the Linux 6.16 cycle to avoid a heavy-hitting scheduler regression. For Linux 6.17 that FUTEX_PRIVATE_HASH functionality should in turn be properly fixed up to not cause performance issues.
Linux 6.16 this week also landed Intel Wildcat Lake HID support and other x86 platform driver device additions. There were also some Bcachefs fixes merged this week along with Acer Nitro Gaming Controller “NGR200” support.
Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.16-rc5 announcement:
“Absolutely nothing in here looks all that odd. The bulk of the changes are to drivers, with all the usual suspects (ie gpu and networking tends to be the most noticeable, but we’ve got usb, rtc, platform drivers etc too).
And there’s various filesystem fixes in here too, with several filesystems having sent updates last week. Not that any of them are particularly large, but there’s just several filesystems that all decided to send in their fixes last week: xfs, btrfs, smb and nfs
clients, bcachefs and netfs).Other than that it’s the usual random sprinkling of fixes.
Please keep testing, but this all feels fairly regular for this phase of the release,”
Linux 6.16 stable should be out by the end of July or early August if an extra release candidate is warranted. There are many interesting changes to find with Linux 6.16.
