Torvalds releases Linux 6.15

Linus Torvalds has released the expected Linux kernel 6.15 with a few hours delay. A last-minute bug was responsible for the delay.

Linux 6.15 comes almost exactly two months after Linux 6.14. In the release announcement e-mail on the Linux kernel mailing list, Torvalds explained that a last-minute bug meant that a new feature had to be deactivated again. Apart from this lightning action, everything looked normal with the new kernel last week.

Linux 6.15: Many small corrections

Torvalds goes on to explain that kernel 6.15 has received many “random small fixes all over the place”, with drivers “responsible for most of them as usual”. Of particular relevance to Torvalds are some bcachefs bug fixes. Linux 6.15 also irons out networking errors in the core and in memory management (mm). None of this looks particularly scary.

This also means that the merge window for the changes for kernel 6.16 will open as usual on Monday of this week. Torvalds jokes that he sees “the usual people being proactive”, continuing to send him their pull requests. And this on Memorial Day, a public holiday in the USA. He agrees with the US Postal Service (USPS): “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” – nor Memorial Day – can stop the Merge Window. “Although, when I think of the ice storm last winter, snow does sometimes stop the Merge Window. But only temporarily,” Torvalds concludes his email.

As usual, the source code is available to download and compile yourself at kernel.org. A more in-depth analysis of the changes in kernel 6.15 is expected to follow tomorrow, Tuesday, here on heise online.

Linux 6.14 was released at the end of March, and the kernel came with optimizations designed to improve the performance of Windows apps under Wine and direct I/O. Here, too, the release was delayed by a whole day. However, Torvalds blames this on his forgetfulness.

(dmk)