Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.16-rc4 as we prepare to close out the first half of 2025 and hitting roughly one month until the Linux 6.16 stable release.
Linux 6.16-rc4 does incorporate the Bcachefs changes that weren’t pulled last week but with Linus Torvalds now considering the removal of Bcachefs in the Linux 6.17 cycle. We’ll see what happens but in any event the latest code for Bcachefs is now present in Linux 6.16-rc4 in it being mainline at least through v6.16.
Linux 6.16-rc4 also pulled in cleaner shader support for more AMD GFX9 / CDNA Instinct accelerator GPUs in the name of better security across users/applications.
Linus Torvalds wrote a few moments ago in the 6.16-rc4 announcement:
“Despite a fairly large merge window, things continue to look fairly calm on the rc front.
So rc4 is about one third filesystem updates (mostly bcachefs, but some smb and btrfs too), one third drivers (all over, really, but device mapper stands out mostly due to a couple of reverts due to performance issues), and one third “miscellaneous”. That last third is pretty random: doc updates, arch fixes (loongarch, um, x86), selftests, and just various random fixes all over.
Anyway, please do keep testing.”
There are many new features to find with Linux 6.16 with the stable release expected by the end of July.
