Linus Torvalds Announces the First Linux Kernel 6.8 Release Candidate

The final release of Linux kernel 6.8 is expected to hit the streets in late March 2024, either on March 10th or March 17th.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Linux 6.8

The development of the Linux kernel continues with Linux 6.8, the next major kernel series, and Linus Torvalds just announced today the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone for public testing.

The two-week merge window for Linux kernel 6.8 opened automatically with the release of Linux 6.7, and now, it’s closed, which means that the first Release Candidate (RC) development version is available for early adopters, distro maintainers, and bleeding-edge users.

According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 6.8 looks to be a small release that promises mostly updated drivers for graphics and networking, but also filesystem updates, mostly for bcachefs, XFS, Btrfs, and VFS, as well as architecture, tooling, mm, networking, core kernel, and documentation updates.

“So this wasn’t the most pleasant merge window, but most of the unpleasantness was entirely unrelated to the code base and almost entirely related to nasty weather,” said Linus Torvalds. “Just a few technical hiccups. And after a very big 6.7 release, 6.8 looks to actually be smaller than average, although not really all that significantly so.”

The final release of Linux kernel 6.8 is expected to hit the streets in mid-March 2024, either on March 10th or March 17th, which depends on how many Release Candidate (RC) milestones will be released until then.

We should expect Linux 6.8 to arrive on March 10th if Linus Torvalds announces seven Release Candidate versions or on March 17th if eight Release Candidates are announced by then. However, it will be short-lived and supported for only a few months with security and bugfix updates.

Until then, you can take the first Linux kernel 6.8 Release Candidate for a test drive on your personal computer by downloading it from Linus Torvalds’ Git tree or the kernel.org website. Please remember that this is a pre-release version, so don’t install or use it on a production machine!

Last updated 3 months ago

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