Linus Torvalds has announced the latest Linux update – version 6.0 – has arrived for testing.
In a public statement (opens in new tab), Torvalds explains that “there’s nothing fundamentally different about this release” despite taking on the new 6.0 number, which primarily serves as a tool to help distinguish releases.
While it may not quite be the same jump as macOS users will experience with Ventura which is due later this year, Torvalds says “there’s about 13.5k non-merge commits in here,” and a further 800 or so merges.
Linux 6.0
Almost two-thirds of the updates, he says, are down to driver updates, including GPU, networking, and sound. The remaining updates include filesystems, tooling, and “just random changes all over,” which is typical of any OS refresh.
Phoronix (opens in new tab) uncovered some performance enhancements on performance-oriented Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, and AMD Threadripper processors, along with plenty of other improvements elsewhere.
The Rust for Linux patches were not merged in this release, which Torvalds had hoped would have been the case, but we expect developers are on the case and later releases could fix this.
Eligible participants are being asked to test Linux 6.0-rc1, which landed yesterday 14 August 2022, so that a full release can be pushed out later this fall alongside macOS Ventura. Current hopes are set for an early-October 2022 launch.
Overall, Linux 6.0-rc1 contains “13,099 files changed, 1,280,295 insertions, [and] 341,210 deletions,” which Torvalds calculated out of curiosity.