The seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.16 is now availablr for testing with the stable release debuting hopefully next Sunday otherwise the following week.
Linux 6.16-rc7 was just tagged by Linus Torvalds to facilitate another week of bug/regression testing with a collection of all the fixes for the past week. Being merged for Linux 6.16-rc7 include more Bcachefs fixes, a fix for some older AMD Radeon GPUs producing a lot of log spam after resuming from suspend, and a fix for possible bogus / miscalculated load averages due to an incorrect change merged to the Linux kernel back in 2021. Plus an assortment of other random bug/regression fixes across the board.
Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.16-rc7 announcement:
“So last week started very quiet and that always makes me happy. Then on Thursday I started getting some updates, and I went “ok, so at least we have some networking fixes”, but things otherwise still felt like this was going to be a tiny rc7.
And then Friday came along.
And the weekend.
And here we are, with a not inconsiderable rc7.
That said, the last few days I ended up getting a fair amount of pull requests, but pretty much all of them were tiny. A lot of single-fix pulls, and while rc7 isn’t the tiny release it looked like mid-week, it’s also not really any bigger than usual.
So there are fixes all over, they are all pretty small.
Nothing really stands out – the biggest patches in here are for some documentation and self-tests or tooling, not actual kernel code
changes.So unlike the week before, it all feels very trivial and I think we’re in good shape. Knock wood.”
Linux 6.16 will be out in the next week or two with its many great new features and changes. After that it’s onto the very exciting Linux 6.17 merge window. Linux 6.17 in turn is what’s expected to power the likes of Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 at launch.
