The fifth weekly release candidate of the Linux 6.15 kernel is now available for testing.
Linux 6.15-rc5 is out to kick off May and hopefully culminating with the Linux 6.15 stable release before the month is through. Linux 6.15-rc5 delivers Intel Panther Lake support in the HID driver, Alienware m15 R7 gaming laptop support in the Alienware WMI WMAX driver, and other laptop improvements. Linux 6.15-rc5 also includes more Bcachefs file-system fixes and various other small fixes.
Still outstanding is a performance regression for newer AMD CPUs but there’s a patch undergoing review that will hopefully be merged in the coming days.
Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.15-rc5 announcement:
“So we may have had a larger merge window than usual, but the rc releases continue to look pretty regular.
Because once again, this rc is right in the middle of our usual stats for the rc5 timeframe, both in number of commits and in lines changed. The diffstat also looks mostly nice and flat (ie mostly small one- and few-liners). There’s a couple of drivers with more than a few lines of changes (and on the filesystem side we have some bcachefs and smb client fixes), but most of it looks very nice and small.
I think the biggest patches in here are for some selftest updates, and in fact about a fifth of the diff overall is just selftests.
Not counting the selftests, the rest is mostly drivers (networking dominates, and for once gpu is tiny), with the already mentioned filesystem changes coming in second. The rest is a mix of networking and just random small fixes (arch, tracing, some minor core fixes).
So it all feels like things are just continuing to go well this release. Let’s hope I didn’t jinx it by saying so,”
There are many great Linux 6.15 features and changes to look forward to with that next kernel stable release in likely three or four weeks from today.
