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Linus Torvalds has officially kicked off the RC development cycle of the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel series by tagging the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone for public testing.
The two-week merge window for Linux kernel 6.3 opened automatically with the release of Linux 6.2, and now, the first Release Candidate (RC) development version is available for early adopters, distro maintainers, and bleeding-edge users who want to get a glimpse of what’s about to be included in the final release.
As expected, Linux kernel 6.3 will introduce several new features and improvements, as well as new and updated drivers for better hardware support. Some highlights include more Rust code, initial support for Intel’s 14th Gen Meteor Lake processors, initial support for Steam Deck’s controller interface, more cool features for AMD RDNA3 GPUs and AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPUs, and support for Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and other newer Qualcomm SoCs.
There will also be some audio improvements for HP EliteDesk 800 G6 Tower PC and Dell Precision 3260 workstation, improved support for the HP Elitebook laptop, support for the HP OMEN 16-n0xxx gaming laptop, as well as various RISC-V, MIPS, exFAT, PowerPC, and AArch64 (ARM64) improvements.
Some other interesting changes in Linux kernel 6.3 include the removal of classic Intel C/C++ compiler (ICC) support since it hasn’t been updated in the past 3 years, the removal of various obsolete DRM drivers, and improved support for NVIDIA BlueField DPUs.
The final release of Linux kernel 6.3 is expected to hit the streets in late April 2023, either on April 23rd or April 30th, which depends on how many Release Candidate (RC) milestones will be released until then. It will most likely be available to Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed users in early May 2023.
Until then, you can take the first Linux kernel 6.3 Release Candidate for a test drive on your personal computer by downloading it from Linus Torvalds’ Git tree or from the kernel.org website. Please remember that this is a pre-release version, so don’t install or use it on a production machine!
Linus Torvalds writes in his announcement post that the Linux 6.3-rc1 patch looks fairly normal and consists of about 55 percent updated and new drivers, about 20 percent architecture updates, and the rest is the usual random mix of documentation, tooling, networking, filesystem, and core kernel stuff.
Last updated 1 year ago
