Linus Torvalds gave everyone (whether they celebrate the festive event or not) a timely Christmas present with the release of Linux 6.2-rc1 (Release Candidate 1). This followed a twoweek merge window during which disruptive changes were allowed to be added to the new kernel, and we are now well into the stabilisation period that normally follows the first RC release. Typically, there are seven or eight Release Candidates prior to the final release, and then the whole process repeats over again.
As Linus himself said, “6.2 looks like it’s a bigger release (certainly bigger than 6.1 was).” One of the big new features continues to be that of enabling support for the Rust programming language. Linux 6.1 added some initial hooks that technically enabled you to compile a Hello World kernel module, but it wasn’t possible to do much beyond that in 6.1. And neither is it possible to do much more in 6.2, but new capabilities are being added – slowly.