Linus Torvalds announced the release this evening of the Linux 6.13-rc3 kernel as Linux 6.13 works its way to stable release by late January.
Linux 6.13-rc3 brings another week’s worth of various bug/regression fixes to the kernel. There’s a little bit of everything from graphics drivers to file-systems and all the other random hardware churn.
One change found in Linux 6.13-rc3 is the partial step for what I covered this morning of a “hilarious/revolting performance regression” discovered by Google engineers with recent Intel Xeon CPUs having “wildly expensive” CPUID costs. Linux 6.14 will have a full workaround while for Linux 6.13-rc3 the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) will rely on CPUID caching to speed things up to help Intel Xeon processors.
As for Linux 6.13-rc3 at large, Linus Torvalds commented in the release announcement:
“Earlier this week it felt to me like things might have already started to quiet down in prep for the holidays, but doing the statistics on rc3 that doesn’t actually seem to be the case – this looks very regular both in number of commits and in diff size. In fact, the diff is a bit on the larger side, but that is admittedly almost entirely due to the revert of a unicode change that then makes the diff large due to a generated data file.
So everything looks normal so far. xfs may stand out in the shortlog below, but the bulk of the diff (ignoring that generated unicode table) is still mostly random driver updates.”
See the Linux 6.13 feature overview to learn more about the kernel changes overall that are new to the Linux 6.13 kernel.
