Kernel release status

[Posted October 1, 2025 by corbet]

The 6.17 kernel is out, released on September 28. Linus commented:

It's not exciting, which is all good. I think the biggest patch in there is some locking fixes for some bluetooth races that could cause use-after-free situations. Whee - that's about as exciting as it gets.
Other than that, there' the usual driver fixlets (GPU and networking dominate as usual, but "dominate" is still pretty small), there's some minor random other driver updates, some filesystem noise, and core kernel and mm.
And some selftest updates.

Significant features in this release include better control over x86 Spectre mitigations, live patching support on 64-bit Arm platforms, a number of pidfd improvements, the removal of special support for uniprocessor systems, initial support for proxy execution, experimental large-folio support in the Btrfs filesystem, the file_getattr() and file_setattr() system calls, and support for the DualPI2 congestion-control protocol.

See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for more information. In addition, KernelNewbies has a look at the changes that went into 6.17.

Stable updates: 6.16.9, 6.12.49, 6.6.108, and 6.1.154 were released on September 25.

The 6.16.10, 6.12.50 6.6.109, 6.1.155, 5.15.194, 5.10.245, and 5.4.300 updates are in the review process; they are due on October 2.