Linux 6.17-rc2 is one of the smallest releases lately

Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux kernel, has announced the release of Linux 6.17-rc2. He said the release has been “very calm” and is one of the “smaller rc2 releases we’ve had lately.” Torvalds, while happy about this, has a sneaking suspicion that the quiet week may lead to a busier week ahead. He speculated that the small size could be due to it being the August vacation season in Europe, or there just being less things to fix from the recent merge window.

The merge window is the time when the major new features get added to the kernel, this happens for two weeks following a stable release and is then followed by seven or eight release candidates which are designed to stabilize the kernel following the addition of the new features.

Most of the fixes in this update were made to drivers, specifically for block, GPU, networking, and sound, specifically there were some SCSI and Firewire fixes. The largest single chunk of changes in drivers was the removal of the drbd page pool code. Outside of drivers, changes were made to filesystems, including SMB, XFS, EROFS, and BTRFS, core networking, and architecture fixes for x86.

The shortlog included with Torvalds’ announcement lists fixes from numerous contributors including a use-after-free bug in habanalabs, fixing a race condition in mm (memory management) related to collapse, and a fix for SCSI sysfs attributes. Some notable changes include fixes for BTRFS iteration and subpage deadlocks, as well as XFS filesystem asserts. There’s also a fix for a potential deadlock in io_uring and several fixes for netfilter.

Despite his suspicions about next week, Linus Torvalds has expressed hope for a quiet next week too. He mentioned that he will be traveling again so the less issues there are, the better it is for him. We still have another two weeks left of August and people may still be vacationing so it’s certainly possible that Torvalds will get his wish.

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Posted Monday 18 August 2025 at 6:32 pm AEST (my time).

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