Linux 6.9-rc5 Released: The Diffstat "Looks A Bit Wonky" But Not Bad

The fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.9 is now available as the kernel cycle looks to get wrapped up by mid-May.

This week brought yet more Bcachefs fixes and recovery improvements for this experimental copy-on-write file-system that has shown promising capabilities. Linux 6.9-rc5 also lands BHI mitigation fixes and other x86/urgent material that was on my radar. Much of the rest of the work this week is the usual bug/regression fixing churn.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the announcement for Linux 6.9-rc5:

"Another week, another -rc. Things look fairly normal, although the diffstat for rc5 looks a bit wonky due to another rash of bcachefs fixes, and a perf tools header sync with the main kernel headers.

But if you ignore those oddities, it all looks pretty normal and things appear fairly calm. Which is just as well, since the first part of the week I was on a quick trip to Seattle, and the second part of the week I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus. Sooo much mucus.

Anyway, moving on..

Apart from the already mentioned bcachefs and header updates, it's mostly various drivers (gpu, networking, usb, tty, sound..) some architecture updates (mainly x86 kvm), some small MM patches, some core networking, a couple of small filesystem updates (fuse, 9p, nfsd) and just random singleton patches elsewhere."

The Linux 6.9 kernel features are great and the performance benchmarks I've been carrying out so far are in good shape. Linux 6.9 stable should be out by mid-May depending upon how the rest of the release cycle plays out.