Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of the third release candidate for Linux kernel 6.15, continuing the development cycle with a collection of incremental improvements and bug fixes across numerous subsystems.
This update brings stability enhancements while maintaining the regular weekly development cadence.
“There’s absolutely nothing of huge note here as far as I can tell. Just a fair number of small fixes all over the place,” reads the announcement.
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“The biggest changes are to fix some ublk driver issues, and the related selftests for the same. The rest is generally one- or few-lines.”
Key Fixes and Improvements
This release candidate features approximately 200 commits addressing various issues throughout the kernel.
Notably, the Universal Block Layer (ublk) driver received significant attention with multiple commits from Ming Lei, including:
Several memory management fixes landed in this RC, including patches from David Hildenbrand addressing folio splitting issues and Johannes Weiner’s optimization for page allocation with mm: page_alloc: speed up fallbacks in rmqueue_bulk().
Networking subsystem received numerous fixes, with notable contributions to various drivers including hibmcge, bnxt, and Mellanox hardware support.
Jakub Kicinski submitted twelve patches, largely focusing on netlink specifications and device locking mechanisms.
Kent Overstreet contributed nine patches to bcachefs, addressing issues such as data read retry handling, btree root unreadability, and snapshot operations. XFS also saw improvements for zoned devices and buffer management from Darrick J. Wong.
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem received multiple fixes for AMD, Intel, and MSM drivers, focusing on display controller configurations and memory management improvements.
Compiler Compatibility Issues
In a follow-up message shortly after the release announcement, Torvalds noted an unexpected issue: “Well, that was short-lived – my last-minute fixes to make things build for me with gcc-15 ends up having broken the gcc-14, as reported by Chris Clayton.”
These compiler-related fixes included workarounds for GCC 15’s new warnings about unterminated string initialization, sequence-point handling, and the addition of __nonstring markers to byte arrays. Torvalds quickly pushed a fix to resolve the compatibility issue with GCC 14.
This release comes as part of the standard kernel development cycle, following the earlier -rc1 and -rc2 releases.
Despite the “fairly big” merge window, Torvalds noted that it “doesn’t seem to have resulted in any particular pain. At least so far. Knock wood.”
Developers can download and test Linux 6.15-rc3 from the kernel.org repository or via git. The final release of Linux 6.15 is expected in approximately 4-5 weeks, assuming the typical seven to eight weekly release candidates.
As always, users running critical systems should wait for the stable release rather than deploying these development versions in production environments.
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