Even though Linux creator Linus Torvalds lost internet and power during a winter storm last weekend and for most of this week, he still released Linux 6.8-rc1 on time after the two-week merge window.

Linus Torvalds wrote this evening in the 6.8-rc1 announcement:

"The merge window wasn't the most pleasant, but most of the unpleasantness had nothing to do with the codebase and almost everything to do with the bad weather. Just some technical hiccups. After the big 6.7 release, 6.8 actually looks a little smaller than average, though not that significantly.

Although it may be a little smaller than usual (blame it on the holidays), it still looks normal overall. Most of this update will be driver updates (GPU and network drivers are a big deal as always), but we also have sizable filesystem updates (mainly core vfs, bcachefs, xfs, and btrfs) and obviously all the usual Arch updates.

Linux 6.8 brings a new experimental Intel