Linux 6.10 released
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 6.10, highlighting that the last week of development was somewhat more active than previous weeks, but not enough to necessitate an additional release candidate. The final week’s activities were largely centered around the bcachefs and netfs filesystems, which accounted for about a third of the patches. Another third of the updates involved various drivers, while the remaining patches were categorized as miscellaneous.
This release paves the way for the merge window of Linux 6.11, which is set to open tomorrow. This timing coincides with the start of summer vacations in much of Europe, which may influence the pace of subsequent contributions. Nonetheless, the new release incorporates a wide range of fixes and updates across different subsystems and architectures, underscoring the collaborative efforts of the global developer community.
Significant updates in this release include corrections to PCIe register offsets in Qualcomm’s ARM64 DTS, resolution of endpoint bugs in the USB core, and addressing double-free issues in ethernet drivers. Additionally, there are important latency fixes in the btrfs filesystem, as well as numerous improvements and bug fixes in the bcachefs filesystem. Other notable changes involve driver updates, error code corrections, and enhancements in various system components.
Key contributions include improvements to the bcachefs filesystem, which now has better handling of online reserved shutdowns and fixed issues related to journal entries and inode insertion races. The netfs subsystem also saw important updates, such as fixing slab-use-after-free errors in cachefiles and propagating errors more effectively to avoid infinite loops.
Driver updates are another major component of this release. For example, fixes in the i40e network driver eliminate unnecessary retries during NVM updates, and updates in the octeontx2-af driver address issues with value outputs on error paths and IPv6 ext match for RSS. Additionally, the ASoC subsystem received updates to the rt711-sdw driver, adding missing readable registers.