Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate of Linux 6.17 following a more hectic than usual merge window. As Torvalds went on travels during the merge window, much of the heavy lifting was done in the first week. He thanked those who submitted their code early, having forewarned of the situation. He also noted that late stragglers were met with a “slightly more annoyed Linus.”
The situation where one person"s travels can cause so much disruption to the development of a piece of software that’s used by millions of devices does say something about the maintenance of the project. Nevertheless, the release cycle hasn’t really been hurt, so perhaps the current setup is fine.
Despite the distractions, Torvalds reported that the merge window “did end up looking fairly healthy.” Regarding stats, the release was “pretty normal” in both patch size and number of commits. Torvalds stated that he had to perform a couple of bisections - a debugging technique used to find the specific commit in a Git repository that introduced a bug or regression - to find “trouble spots”, with one being manageable even while traveling.
Included with Torvalds" announcement is a merge log representing the new commits from a “view from 10,000ft”, an overview due to the large number of commits. Contributions cover a wide range of areas including VFS, BPF, Memory Management (MM) updates, x86 CPU mitigations, and various driver and subsystem updates. You can check the changelog over on LKML.
This is just the first release candidate and each cycle normally sees seven or eight release candidates. Given this, we should expect to see Linux 6.17 drop on 28 September or 5 October. Notably Ubuntu 25.10 is expected to ship with the kernel, so let’s hope it’s a good one.
Linux 6.16 came out a few weeks ago now and should be available in some distributions already, mainly those based on Arch Linux. Other distributions that are not rolling release will likely need to wait for a while before being offered it.