Linux 6.17-rc2 is now available to facilitate the latest weekly testing of the Linux 6.17 kernel.
Following last Sunday’s Linux 6.17-rc1 release that capped off the Linux 6.17 merge window, this week saw various bug and regression fixes land. Among those changes this week were fixing an early performance regression introduced in the v6.17 code. Linux 6.17 performance is looking nice in testing thus far. Another notable fix this week is a quirk/workaround for headset detection on the Framework Laptop 13 for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series motherboards. Plus a variety of other regression and bug fixes.
See our Linux 6.17 feature overview to learn more about this kernel that its working its way toward a stable release by early October.
So far a half-hour later Linus Torvalds hasn’t yet posted any usual release announcement to the Linux kernel mailing list, but will update once that is posted to the LKML.
Update: Linus Torvalds has now posted the 6.17-rc2 announcement:
“So it’s been a very calm week, and this is one of the smaller rc2
releases we’ve had lately. I’m definitely not complaining, since I’ve
been jetlagged much of the week, but I have this suspicion that it
just means that next week will see more noise. And I’ll be traveling
again later in the week.But hey, let’s not be pessimistic. Maybe rc2 is small because this
merge window just didn’t have any real issues? Because that’s bound to
happen _eventually_, right? One day we’re bound to hit that mythical
merge window that doesn’t introduce any bugs at all.This merge window wasn’t _that_ good, but maybe it was simply better than most?
Or maybe it’s that much of Europe is still on vacation because it’s August?
Anyway, most of the fixes in rc2 were to drivers – particularly block
(although the biggest chunk of that was simply a removal of the drbd
page pool code). The rest is mostly gpu, networking driver, and sound
fixes. Some SCSI and firewire fixes too.Outside of drivers, it’s filesystems (smb, xfs, erofs, btrfs), core
networking (including some new selftests), and some architecture fixes
(mainly x86).”
