The second release candidate of Linux kernel 7.0 (Linux 7.0-rc2) has been officially released for a new round of testing by the community. Compared with 7.0-rc1 released when the merge window ended a week ago, this rc2 is mainly focused on repair patches, but the overall scale of changes is so large that Linus Torvalds even bluntly said that he was "a little unhappy."
Among the fixes merged this week, the most eye-catching is a series of fixes for the AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver, and there are also a number of fixes scattered across various graphics drivers. Linus Torvalds himself also submitted a patch to remove an old Kconfig option to solve the annoying log flush problem related to uninitialized random numbers. In addition, the code base is also interspersed with the repair of various errors and regression problems, covering a wide range.
Torvalds said in the 7.0-rc2 announcement email released that day that he was "not particularly satisfied" with the scale of this rc2, and hoped that this was just an occasional rhythm fluctuation - that is, there will be a concentration of pull requests this week, and the next week will be relatively calm. He pointed out that judging from the number of non-merge commits, we have not seen such an "inflated" rc2 for some time; this is probably related to the 6.19 development cycle being extended by an extra week, resulting in some work being backlogged until the current cycle.
What is even rarer is that the composition of this rc2 change is also different from the norm. Torvalds points out that while driver modifications still account for about a quarter of the differences, it's "only" a quarter - and in previous rc2s, the driver subsystem usually contributed at least half of the changes. This file system-related update accounts for about 25%, which is mainly SMB client, but also includes repairs and improvements to file systems such as XFS and EROFS.
The remaining about half of the changes are more scattered, mainly focusing on test code (especially BPF testing), kernel core code, BPF subsystem itself, various architecture support codes, and network stacks. Structurally, rc2 has fully switched from the "feature-oriented" nature of the merge window to the patching mode for stability, but the overall scale still shows the intensive workload at the beginning of the 7.0 cycle.
The Linux 7.0 stable version is currently expected to be released around mid-April, which will bring a series of new features including multiple preparatory updates for new platforms such as AMD Zen 6 and Intel Nova Lake. For kernel developers and testers, the current 7.0-rc2 marks the official acceleration of the repair phase, and also sets the tone for the pace of several subsequent candidate versions.
learn more:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wh=dScTmB+zr7zDdBB-SeFHuqgoQx5PSX5Yusp7LiqgrQ@mail.gmail.com/T/#u