Last week with Linux 6.1-rc5 there was concerns raised by Linus Torvalds that the v6.1 cycle may need an extra week of testing and fixes. Now Linux 6.1-rc6 is available with Torvalds’ latest prognosis for the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle.

Linus Torvalds wrote as today’s Linux 6.1-rc6 announcement:

So here we are at rc6 and the story hasn’t changed: this rc is still a bit larger than I would have preferred, but at the same time there’s nothing that looks scary or particularly odd in here.

It’s predominantly driver changes all over, with networking and gpu drivers (not surprisingly) leading the pack, but it’s really a fairly mixed bag.

Outside of drivers you have the usual smattering of core kernel code – architecture updates, some filesystem work, and some core kernel and networking.

It’s easy enough to scan through the appended shortlog and get a feeling for what’s going on. Absolutely nothing that makes me worried, apart just from the fact that there’s still a fair number of them. I’m still waffling about whether there will be an rc8 or not, leaning a bit towards it happening. We’ll see – it will make the 6.2 merge window leak into the holidays, but maybe that’s fine and just makes people make sure they have everything lined up and ready *before* the merge window opens, the way things _should_ work.

So we’ll see. Nothing worrisome, just 300+ small fixes in the last week. Please go test,

Linux 6.1 stable will release on 4 December if Linus Torvalds doesn’t opt for the 6.1-rc8 release otherwise it will push the final release back to 11 December. After that it’s on to the Linux 6.2 merge window.

Of the new material merged this week is support for the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 that was recently released along with the Surface Laptop 5. A new ACPI ID for an upcoming AMD platform also made it in as did an s2idle quirk for the Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver with 21A1 machine type.

See the Linux 6.1 feature overview for a look at all of the exciting changes that are being introduced in this new kernel version. Linux 6.1 releasing in December also makes it this year’s Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.