Linux 6.8-rc3 Released - Slightly Larger But Not Too Worrying

Linus Torvalds is up early today and already issued Linux 6.8-rc3 as the newest weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel.

Linux 6.8 stable should be out in March while 6.8-rc3 is the latest weekly test candidate. Linus Torvalds wrote in the rc3 announcement:

"Hmm. A slightly larger rc3 that I'd have hoped for, although at this stage in the release process it's not something that really worries me yet.

Aside from the usual driver fixes (with sound, gpu and nvme standing out), we've got mainly filesystem fixes (tracefs and ext4) and a big chunk of tooling updates (perf and selftests).

The rest is mostly a random collection of fixes all over. Fairly quiet on the arch side, with mainly just some parisc fixes."

Among the changes/fixes merged this week and now found in Linux 6.8-rc3 that I find worth mentioning are initial support for Lenovo Legion Go controllers, dropping -Wstringop-overflow on GCC due to ongoing breakage/issues, an EROFS optimization for low-memory scenarios, and other fixes.

I'll be out with my belated Linux 6.8 feature overview soon along with some fresh Linux 6.8 kernel benchmarking. Linux 6.8 overall is looking great and will be an important release -- all the more so with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS looking at using Linux 6.8.