Linus Torvalds is out with Linux 5.15-rc6 and its increase in size has him slightly worried.

Linus wrote in the 5.15-rc6 announcement, " I'd love to say that it's all looking average, but rc6 is actually bigger than rc5 was, and larger than normal for this time in the release cycle. It's not _enormously_ larger than normal, and it's not the largest rc6 we've had, but it's still slightly worrisome. By rc6 I really do expect things to have started calming down. "

We'll see how this week plays out to see if it will be worrisome or not the rest of the cycle. The brief 5.15-rc6 announcement can be read on the [1]kernel mailing list .

This past week saw mostly the wide assortment of fixes as usual for this stage of development. One somewhat notable change that landed this weekend is [2]AMD SME no longer defaulting to being used on capable machines but rather needing to opt-in to that memory encryption feature. This was done to some buggy platforms that would otherwise experience boot problems with SME.

[3]Linux 5.15 should end up either arriving on Halloween or the first weekend of November, depending upon how the rest of the month plays out.

See our [4]Linux 5.15 feature overview for a look at the changes ahead for this new kernel.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjbXW13Eh6YnB4C5ghLrhJCq0u2bpSNA0JbK8eDb6o_XA@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-SME-No-Default-Use

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Linux+5.15

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-515-features&num=1