Linus Torvalds releases Linux 6.17-rc3, says it's a normal release

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.17-rc3. The release timing was a bit more unusual this week due to Torvalds' travel schedule, but it still fit the usual Sunday afternoon schedule. The third release candidate is noted as being “a bit larger than usual”, which serves to “balance out the tiny rc2.”

While the release is a bit larger than usual, Torvalds said that it was “well within the normal parameters” and not “outrageously so.” Overall, this release is proceeding normally, which means it’s more likely it’ll be out after the seventh release candidate.

The diffstat, which shows the changes in this update, is described by Torvalds as “fairly normal” this week. Approximately half of the changes are in drivers, spread across various components, with the Mellanox mfx5 driver being a standout area. Other notable changes include a new “chunk” of added selftests and more Rust support. There are also a random collection of fixes present in architecture code, filesystems, VM, and core networking.

The Linux kernel development cycle sees a two week merge window where new features are added and then seven to eight weeks of release candidates where the new features a made more stable. Some of the fixes we got this week include fixes for memory leaks in pidfs and iommufd, updates the scsi subsystem, including support for Intel Wildcat Lake, security-related fixes in lib/crypto and ipv6, additions of Rust support in mm (memory management), and fixes for various hardware, such as USB and DRM drivers.

Linus Torvalds ended his announcement by stating that “things seem fairly normal for this phase of the release cycle” and that “nothing stands out.” He has called on the community to keep testing to ensure that everything is working properly by the time of the stable release in a little over one month from now.

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Posted Monday 25 August 2025 at 1:21 pm AEST (my time).

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