Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.13-rc6 as the newest weekly test release of the [1]Linux 6.13 kernel that is working its way toward stable later in January.

Given many developers and testers of the kernel release candidates taking time off for Christmas and New Year holidays, Linux 6.13-rc6 marked another rather light week in kernel development land. Patches did tick up as the week went on but still fairly light given these end of year holidays.

Torvalds wrote just now in the [2]6.13-rc6 announcement :

"So we had a slight pickup in commits this last week, but as expected and hoped for, things were still pretty quiet. About twice as many commits as the holiday week, but that's still not all that many.

I expect things will start becoming more normal now that people are back from the holidays and are starting to recover and wake up from their food comas.

In the meantime, below is the shortlog for the last week. Nothing particularly stands out, the changes are dominated by various driver updates (gpu, rdma and networking), with a random smattering of fixes elsewhere."

We'll see how next week plays out for Linux 6.13-rc7 and if Linus Torvalds decides to issue Linux 6.13 the following Sunday or extend it out by an extra week with a 6.13-rc8 kernel to allow for an extra week of testing/fixes given the holiday slowdown. In any event Linux 6.13 should be out before the end of January.

See the [3]Linux 6.13 feature overview for a look at all of the major changes coming to this first kernel version of 2025.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.13

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgjfaLyhU2L84XbkY+Jj47hryY_f1SBxmnnZi4QOJKGaw@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-613-features