Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has officially started the development cycle for the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel series and announced general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone. He also begged developers to help him out by adding code earlier in the development cycle.
The first release candidate of Linux 6.1 effectively closes the merge window for this feature-rich kernel release. Linux 6.1 stable is expected to be released in December and will most likely serve as this year’s Linux LTS kernel release.
In the last two weeks, Linux 6.1 has achieved a number of exciting features, including: the initial Rust infrastructure, which will be expanded over future kernel cycles with new Rust drivers and subsystem additions; MGLRU, which will offer considerable performance potential, especially for memory-constrained systems; continued work on the new Intel Arc Graphics and AMD RDNA3 graphics support; the Kernel Memory Sanitizer. Also, Linux x86 64 will warn by default over W+X mappings.
Despite the upgrade, the founder explained that version 6.1 is not turning out to be a massive release, as it recorded 11.5k non-merge commits during this merge window, compared to 13.5k the previous time.
He also revealed that he is not happy with the attitude of developers who submit code late.
“Yes, the merge window is two weeks, but that’s very much to allow me time to look things over, not ‘two weeks to hurriedly put together a branch that you send Linus on Friday of the second week’. The whole ‘do an all-nighter to get the paper in the day before the deadline’ is something that should have gone out the window after high school. Not for kernel development,” he wrote.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheRegister.