Linux 6.16 released as Linus Torvalds warns of potential 6.17 delay

Following the seventh release candidate of Linux 6.16 last week, Linus Torvalds has released the stable version for Linux distributions to take and roll out to their users, bringing more hardware support. Torvalds called it a “nice and calm” final week for the development cycle, which meant we didn’t need to see an eighth release candidate.

Looking forward to Linux 6.17, Torvalds has warned of a “slightly chaotic” merge window due to extensive family travel in August for a wedding and a big birthday. His travel schedule means that he will be away for about half a month, split between the US and Finland. This could impact his ability to process pull requests efficiently during the second week of the merge window when significant new features are being added.

The merge window usually lasts two weeks, followed by the first of seven or eight release candidates. The merge window sees major new features added before testing takes place during the release candidate period. With all that’s going on, Torvalds wants to get as much done in the first week as possible and gave regular contributors a heads-up and has so far received 50 pending pull requests due to his proactive measures.

While Torvalds is doing as much as he can to avoid issues, he conceded that if he can’t process all the pull requests in the second week, he “might delay rc1 a bit just to catch up”. He said that this extension doesn’t mean leniency for late requests, so anyone looking to submit code should still be prompt or face waiting until Linux 6.18.

If some of the pull requests were not processed during the second week, Torvalds says he may delay the release for a couple of days, so the new features should make it if submitted on time. However, the more hectic things get, the greater the chance that we see more release candidates.

Despite all this, Torvalds still believes we could still have a normal release window; it’s just that things could get delayed, and he’s providing a warning to let everyone know what’s happening if delays occur.

With regard to Linux 6.16, most people should avoid trying to install this on their Linux installations manually as there will be a high chance that it fails due to its low-level nature in the software stack. If you’re fortunate, you’ll have a distribution that pushes it as an update, but if you’re on something slower like Ubuntu, you might be waiting until the next big distro update.

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Posted Monday 28 July 2025 at 5:45 pm AEST (my time).

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