IT Home June 10th news, Linus Torvalds released the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the Linux 6.16 kernel series today (June 10th), and called on developers to actively test it, but reminded that this version is a pre-release version and is not suitable for use in production environments.
The merge window period of Linux 6.16 has been closed. According to the previous update pace, the Linux 6.16 kernel will continue to release new RC candidate versions every Sunday, and the official version is expected to be released in 2 months.
IT Home quoted the blog post and introduced that in terms of functions, the first RC of the Linux 6.16 kernel In order to improve power management efficiency, the candidate version has added a systemd service to run cpupower. In addition, the bcachefs file system is optimized. The EXT4 file system introduces large page support and multi-fsblock atomic write function.
In terms of hardware support, new Intel Auto Counter Reload (ACR), Intel APX and nouveau support NVIDIA Hopper / Blackwell GPUs, etc. are added.
In addition, Linux 6.16 also supports fscrypt's hardware packaging key, Intel QAT hardware accelerator to improve EROFS's DEFLATE decompression performance, and AMD ACP 7.x, Intel AVS platform and Tegra264 driver support.
The final version is expected to be released on July 27, 2025 (if there are 7 RC versions) or August 3 (if there are 8 RC versions), depending on the progress of RC testing.
