Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17-rc1 kernel a few hours ahead of his typical release regiment due to currently being in Europe. That marks the end of the Linux 6.17 merge window with many exciting changes merged this cycle. This is notable with Linux 6.17 expected to power Ubuntu 25.10 and other late 2025 Linux distribution releases.
I will have up my feature overview of Linux 6.17 in the next day or two. But for some quick highlights of the Linux 6.17 merge window: Intel Xe3 graphics for Panther Lake are no enabled by default, standardizing the keycode for the “Performance Boost” key on relevant laptops, the gconfig kernel configuration editor is updated to using GTK3, various file-system performance improvements, more Rust language additions, Attack Vector Controls makes it easier administering relevant CPU security mitigations, SR-IOV for Intel Battlemage graphics cards and multi-GPU prep work for Project Battlematrix, new ARM and RISC-V SoC support, and many other changes. Again our Linux 6.17 feature overview for a more comprehensive look at the changes merged over the past two weeks will be published in the coming days.
Linux 6.17 was another busy cycle but not being merged were any updates for the Bcachefs file-system. There was a Bcachefs pull request submitted with new feature code but it wasn’t merged and no comment by Linus Torvalds. Though there was some suggestion that Torvalds is letting Linux 6.17 stay this cycle so people can migrate off of it and have enough notice and to then remove it from the mainline kernel in Linux 6.18… We’ll see if Linus says anything about Bcachefs in the Linux 6.17-rc1 announcement (still waiting for Torvalds to post his commentary to the kernel mailing list while v6.17-rc1 is already tagged in Git). The RISC-V feature changes were rejected this cycle too as another notable upset.
In any event, Linux 6.17-rc1 is now available for testing. I’ll have up my Linux 6.17 feature overview shortly and begin firing off more benchmarks of Linux 6.17 Git. Linux 6.17 stable should be out around the end of September or early October if an extra release candidate is warranted.
