Linus Torvalds launched Linux 6.0-rc2, the second Release Candidate of the next major Linux kernel update. At this point, the developers have started testing things, and typically they haven't started finding bugs yet. That has happened in this second rc, and the Finnish developer says there is no «nothing particularly interesting here«, followed by the explanation that it is normal at this point.
What is most striking is that a google cloud related patch, as people have been experiencing problems testing on virtual machines in this environment. The worst thing about this is that some automated tests have not been carried out, so no other bugs have been found. So this, coupled with rc2 not usually revealing much, has made for a quiet week.
Linux 6.0-rc2 arrives after a quiet week
The most notable fix here is probably the virtio rollback which fixed the issue people were having with running tests in the Google VMs cloud, which was the "pending issue" we had noticed just as the merge window was closing. . And it's notable primarily because that issue prevented people from running some of the automated tests and thus finding other issues.
But obviously there's a lot of other stuff here as well, according to the attachment. Differences are a bit dominated by amd gpu fixes, they missed the "drm fixes" pull during the merge window, so there were a lot of pending fixes on that side. But there are some network drivers, some filesystem fixes (btrfs and a final ntfs3), and the usual set of architecture fixes and other core code.
If only seven rcs are released, Linux 6.0 will arrive as a stable version next on October 2. If there is time, Canonical will include it in Ubuntu 22.10; if not, Ubuntu users who want to install it will have to pull Mainline or install it manually.