Linux 6.16-rc4 arrives with a focus on filesystem and driver fixes

Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux kernel, has announced the release of Linux 6.16-rc4, meaning we are halfway to getting the final kernel release in three to four weeks. Torvalds described this update as having a fairly large merge window, but said the release candidate process remains calm, which is what we want to see to get the update faster.

Linux kernel development cycles usually see new features arrive in the two weeks after the previous release and then each week after that a new release candidate is pushed with fixes for the new features as well as existing features. The stable version arrives after seven or eight release candidates.

This week, Torvalds said that one-third of the changes were concerning file system updates with a significant focus on bcachefs, alongside some SMB and Btrfs fixes. Another third was driver updates, notably from reverts to device mapper due to some performance issues.

The final third of changes were miscellaneous changes including documentation updates, architecture fixes (LoongArch, UM, x86), selftests, and various other general fixes. As usual, Torvalds asked the community to carry on testing the kernel so that it’s in a better state when the stable version arrives.

Users will be able to get Linux 6.16 quite soon after it is released, especially those running bleeding edge Linux distributions like Arch and Fedora. If you’ve got some newer hardware that’s incompatible with Linux right now, be sure to test it out when Linux 6.16 arrives around the end of July to see if anything changes.

According to Phoronix, the Linux 6.16 kernel is expected to come with some significant hardware improvements including open-source driver support for Nvidia Blackwell and Hopper GPUs, and Intel Wildcat Lake processors.

While Torvalds has called for testers to try out the release candidate, it’s not straightforward to run a different kernel than what ships with your distribution, so don’t mess around with the release candidate on a production machine.

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