Linux 6.17-rc5 is out for testing as the newest weekly release candidate as we near the stable Linux 6.17 release in late September.
Linux 6.17 changes merged this past week include an important stability fix for the open-source NVIDIA “Nouveau” graphics driver, preparing for the upcoming Rust 1.91 release due out in October, new x86 hardware support and device quirks, and even some PCMCIA fixes.
Overall it’s been a nice collection of fixes to land this week, especially for users of the Nouveau kernel driver for that open-source upstream NVIDIA GPU support.
Separately, this week also brought out Linus Torvalds criticized “Link: ” tags in Git commits as “garbage” unless those links happen to provide any extra value beyond the patch message itself.
Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.17-rc5 announcement:
“Things remain normal – both the diffstat and the commit counts look entirely sane. I’d claim that it’s all small patches, but we do have one larger one: the DLink/Sundance driver was resurrected, so in between all the one- and few-liners, there’s a revert that brings back 2k lines in the form that driver.
But if you ignore that one-off oddity, the rest is very much normal. As usual, it’s half drivers (networking, gpu and sound stand out, although there’s also some unusual pcmcia noise in the form of dead code removal).
The rest mostly is a mix of tooling (perf and selftests), some random filesystem, architecture and mm fixes. And other smaller stuff.”
Linux 6.17 stable should be out by the end of September if all goes well. See our Linux 6.17 feature overview to learn more about all of the interesting changes in this kernel release.
