Like clockwork, the Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in hopefully two week's time.

Linux 7.2-rc6 is out with another heavy round of bug fixing... Following the recent uptick in fixes and other Linux kernel patches as a result of AI/LLM coding agents. The sound fixes were far more than wished at this stage of development. The Linux DRM kernel graphics driver fixes also came in heavy. Among many other changes to land this week were working around buggy Western Digital SATA drives and some AMD Zen 5 CPU models being mistakenly identified as Zen 6.

Linus Torvalds wrote in the 7.2-rc6 announcement:

"Hmm. This rc is huge. Even by the "new normal" standards this is a big rc, and I think it's the biggest rc6 we've had in years at least by commit count.

The stats don't look particularly strange: it's just under 60% drivers, 20% networking, and 20% "rest" (arch, tooling, filesystems - nothing particularly odd). And that driver side is the usual gpu and networking drivers, but not exclusively so - we have sound, spi, ata etc in there too.

So a lot of networking stuff, which is at least partly the whole continued backlog from conference timing. I hope that's all there is to this, but it is a bit unnerving how bit the changes are at this point, even if nothing in here actually looks all that strange.

There's nothing in here that screams "bad" or implies that the release needs delaying, but I sure hope we calm down for the remaining two weeks."

See the Linux 7.2 feature overview for more details on the changes to find in this kernel version debuting later in August.