Linus Torvalds has announced the latest release of the Linux kernel, version 6.17-rc5, which is now available with a range of updates and enhancements to various subsystems, drivers, and tooling components. Notable changes include the resurrection of the DLink/Sundance driver and significant improvements to audio, networking, graphics, memory management, filesystems, and architecture-specific code. The release addresses numerous bugs, vulnerabilities, and issues affecting system performance, stability, and security, with a focus on Wi-Fi capabilities, error handling, stability fixes, and protocol handling. Additionally, the kernel has been updated to support newer Rust toolchains and the use of Rust in kernel modules, further enhancing its development and refinement.
Linux Kernel 6.17-rc5 released
The latest release of the Linux kernel, version 6.17-rc5, is now available, bringing a range of updates and enhancements to various subsystems, drivers, and tooling components. This release marks significant progress in addressing numerous bugs, vulnerabilities, and issues affecting system performance, stability, and security.
Key Highlights:
- Resurrection of the DLink/Sundance Driver: A notable exception in this release is the revival of the DLink/Sundance driver, which has been revived after being previously abandoned. This move aims to improve support for Wi-Fi adapters utilizing this hardware.
- Audio Enhancements and Fixes: The ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and ASoC (Advanced System on Chip) subsystems have received enhancements and bug fixes, focusing on headset microphones, HDMI codecs, specific audio codecs (e.g., tas2781), USB audio device functionality, including mute TLV support and samplerate adjustments.
- Networking Improvements: Extensive updates and fixes have been applied across various network drivers, such as mt76, iwlwifi, brcmfmac, ath11k, i40e, ice, axienet, sfp, thunder_bgx. These improvements cover Wi-Fi capabilities (EHT operation, scanning, MLO flags), error handling, stability fixes (use-after-free, NULL pointer dereferences), security measures (SSID length capping), and protocol handling (VXLAN, SMC, TCP-AO).
- Graphics and DRM/AMDGPU Corrections: The Linux kernel has been corrected to handle MES configuration failure, removed hardware access in audio finalization, and applied memory barrier fixes for the Nouveau driver.
- Memory Management Fixes: Several memory management-related issues have been addressed, including vmalloc shadow memory races, userfaultfd LIFO ordering, potential deadlocks in kmemleak, accounting of memmap pages, and enhancements in page table synchronization.
- Filesystem Improvements: The Btrfs filesystem has seen improvements addressing transaction aborts on link failures, inode leaks, and race conditions. Ocfs2 fixes have been applied to prevent journal inode release issues.
Architecture-Specific Updates:
- ARM64 and RISC-V Enhancements: ARM64 and RISC-V architectures have received numerous commits focusing on DTS (Device Tree Source) updates for various Rockchip and i.MX platforms, sparse warnings, exception handling, memory access issues specific to these architectures. Additionally, RISC-V has seen updates for BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) and __put_user operations.
- x86 Architecture Fixes: The x86 architecture also received numerous commits addressing various issues.
Tooling and Selftests Enhancements:
- perf Tools Updates: The perf tools have been updated with enhancements, including BPF event handling and symbol parsing.
- Kernel Selftest Fixes: Kernel selftests have been fixed for network tests, netfilter, and memory management tests.
Security and Stability Improvements:
- A broad range of fixes targeting common vulnerabilities such as NULL pointer dereferences, use-after-free errors, memory leaks, buffer overflows, and improper error handling across many drivers and subsystems.
- Rust Integration: The kernel has been updated to support newer Rust toolchains and the use of Rust in kernel modules.
Linux kernel 6.17-rc5 released
Linux kernel version 6.17-rc5 is now available:
Full source: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-6.17-rc5.tar.gz
Patch: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/p/v6.17-rc5/v6.16
You can view the summary of the changes at the following URL:
https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/ds/v6.17-rc5/v6.17-rc4
