AdminLinus Torvalds announced that the latest Linux update – version 6.0 – has arrived for testing.
In public statement (opens in a new tab)Torvalds explains that “there is nothing fundamentally different about this release,” despite the adoption of the new 6.0 number, which primarily serves as a tool to distinguish between releases.
While this may not be the same leap that macOS users will experience with Ventura, which is due out later this year, Torvalds says, “There are roughly 13,500 people here.”
Linux 6.0
Almost two-thirds of the updates, he says, relate to driver updates, including GPU, network, and audio. The remaining updates include filesystems, utilities, and “just random changes throughout,” which is typical of any operating system refresh.
Phoronix (opens in a new tab) discovered some performance improvements on the performance-oriented Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC and AMD Threadripper processors, as well as many other improvements elsewhere.
Rust patches for Linux were not merged in this release, which Torvalds hoped would have come to terms with, but we expect the developers to take care of it and later releases may fix it.
Eligible participants are asked to test Linux 6.0-rc1, which landed yesterday on August 14, 2022, so that the full version can be released later this fall along with macOS Ventura. Current hopes are related to the premiere at the beginning of October 2022.
Overall, Linux 6.0-rc1 contains “13,099 changed files, 1,280,295 patches, [and] 341,210 deletions ”that Torvalds calculated out of curiosity.
