Linux 6.17-rc4 looks normal as Torvalds returns from travels

Linus Torvalds is back from his August travels and has caught up on his emails and other tasks. While he handled pull requests while traveling, his email responses may have been delayed. The kernel founder said that normal operations have now resumed, and he can no longer blame travel for any mistakes.

The Linux founder has now released the fourth release candidate of Linux 6.17. He described it as pretty normal in terms of commit numbers and diffstat. He said that nothing strange jumped out this week, suggesting a stable and uneventful development week. Despite this, there were two slightly larger fixes made for the Intel idpf network driver and updates for arm64 kvm system register handling, but these are still not considered huge.

Torvalds has called on the community to keep testing the release candidate. The goal is to get 6.17 out in a “timely manner and in good shape.” Torvalds topped off his post saying “Knock wood,” highlighting the unpredictability of the development cycle. He has previously said that the prior weeks were quiet, possibly because of people going on vacation. If these people resume development work in September, more issues may crop up.

A log of the fixes in this release was also published; most of the changes are just one-line code changes or a few lines. The detailed list of changes shows a wide variety of fixes, including those for HID drivers, networking, DRM/GPU, KVM, and filesystem issues. There was also a revert made this week, the log says “Revert ‘virtio: reject shm region if length is zero”.

The code is now available to download from kernel.org, but it’ll only be of interest to developers working on fixes. Most people will want to wait until their Linux distribution has released the kernel update via the update manager to ensure it works properly.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 1 September 2025 at 5:50 pm AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of August): 4,048

RIP Matrix