On July 7, 2024, Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel 6.10 release candidate 7 (RC7). In his message to the Linux Kernel mailing list, Torvalds expressed his satisfaction with the current state of the kernel development.
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A Calm Development Cycle
According to Torvalds, the development cycle has been remarkably calm, with few issues reported. He attributes this calmness to the fact that it was the July 4th week in the US, and many European developers were starting their summer vacations. This reduced activity might have contributed to the peaceful development environment.
Despite the potential influence of seasonal factors, Torvalds expressed cautious optimism about the state of the kernel. He suggested that the calm might simply indicate that version 6.10 is progressing well in its development.
Linux Kernel RC7 Key Updates
Due to the holiday season, RC7 brings only a few important updates and fixes. Here's the notable fixes:
Networking
The TCP metrics validation for source address length has been strengthened, enhancing security. The bonding driver now fixes an out-of-bounds read issue in the ARP IP targets setting function.
File System Updates
Several file systems received attention in this release candidate. The Btrfs file system saw fixes for folio refcount issues and improvements in dirty space handling. EROFS (Enhanced Read-Only File System) received updates to support the FS_IOC_GETFSUUID ioctl and fixed a potential memory leak.
Driver Improvements
The DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) subsystem saw various fixes, including improvements for AMD display drivers and NVIDIA's Nouveau driver. The Intel Wi-Fi driver (iwlwifi) received multiple fixes, including better handling of statistics and power management.
Architecture-Specific Updates
For ARM64 architectures, a few device tree updates were made, particularly for Rockchip platforms. RISC-V saw improvements in its performance monitoring unit driver and stack trace functionality.
Bluetooth Enhancements
The Bluetooth subsystem received a few fixes, including improvements to HCI event handling and L2CAP (Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol) functionality.
For detailed fixes, please refer the RC7 release notes, which I linked in the first paragraph.
Test Linux Kernel 6.10 RC7
Users are encouraged to test the latest release candidate by downloading it from the Kernel.org website or the Linus Torvalds's git tree.
Please note that these development versions should not be used on production systems due to their experimental nature.
