The seventh release candidate of Linux kernel 6.17 has just landed. The good news is that this will be the final release candidate before the official 6.17 release next week, as long as no unexpected issues arise. The Linux founder, Linus Torvalds, described the week as “normal” with “mixed random small changes.” This week doesn’t seem to include an “obvious big concentration of fixes anywhere.”
The changes this week are fairly spread out across various kernel subsystems. Many of the changes are on the driver side, specifically for GPU, networking, and sound. Other fixes were described as being fairly random, and included selftests, architecture fixes (mostly KVM-related), filesystems (most SMB), and core kernel, memory management, and networking code.
Several fixes address KVM issues across different architectures, including ARM64, s390, and LoongArch. Among the changes were multiple reverts, including two by Hugh Dickins concerning the memory management subsystem and one by Andrea Righi related to sched_ext.
There were also fixes for various hardware drivers too, such as for Intel, AMD, and Realtek sound drivers, as well as DRM graphics drivers for AMD and Intel. There were fixes for specific hardware too for Lenovo Thinkbook laptops (Lenovo Thinkbook 13x Gen 5, Gen4) and OneXPlayer handhelds, indicating ongoing efforts to improve device support.
Torvalds has encouraged developers to continue testing the release candidate over the next week. The focus on this release candidate was on stability, which is important for a smooth final release, now expected next week. If issues do pop up at the last minute, Linux 6.17 could be delayed by another week, but we should then get it.
Average Linux users are not advised to try to update to the new kernel when it"s released on their own. You should wait until your preferred Linux distribution publishes it as an update through the update manager as it will then be designed to work properly with your operating system thanks to the application of any necessary tweaks.
Source: LKML