Good news, Linux fans. Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window and released the first release candidate of Linux 6.16. That’s right, folks, RC1 is now available and ready for testing.
Torvalds says things went about as expected this cycle. There were a few more last minute pull requests than usual, but nothing dramatic. In fact, the numbers look pretty standard across the board.
As usual, drivers account for much of the work, making up about half the diff. GPU and networking drivers are especially active. The rest is divided roughly into thirds: architecture updates, tooling and documentation improvements, and core kernel changes.
This cycle includes nearly 13,000 non merge commits and close to 1000 merges, all contributed by 1,783 unique developers. That’s a massive collaboration effort by any standard. Some of the highlights include ongoing work on bcachefs, improvements to io_uring, a continued push for Rust integration, and broad hardware support updates across architectures like ARM, RISC V, LoongArch, MIPS, and more.
File systems like ext4, xfs, btrfs, and f2fs got updates. There were changes to memory management, the scheduler, and block devices too. The usual players like USB, HID, thermal, and ACPI are all represented in the changelog.
With so many moving parts and so many contributors, Linux 6.16 is shaping up to be a strong release. If you’ve been curious about what’s next for the kernel, this is a good time to download RC1 and see what’s cooking. And if you’re a developer, now’s your chance to help shake out bugs before the final release lands.
