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Kernel Watch
Jon Masters keeps up with all the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 6.5, noting he had a “nagging feeling that a lot of people are on vacation and that things have been quiet partly due to that”, but no giant issues had been raised during the development cycle. As a result of the 6.5 release, the merge window (period of time during which disruptive changes can be incorporated into the kernel) is open for what will be 6.6.
Features merged into 6.6 so far include the usual set of updates to work-in-progress Rust language support, drivers and a number of core kernel features. For example, it’s now possible to build a kernel without support for buffer heads, a legacy feature of the Linux filesystem layer that had become a bottleneck, as we detailed last month.