The rc6 release was also a lot less patched than usual last week as many upstream Linux kernel developers were in Berlin for LPC 2022 and other events. Linus thought that the number of patches for rc7 released this week would increase a lot, but he was pleasantly surprised to find that the number of patches in this version did not change much compared to rc6. Mostly related to GPU and web drivers, and other bug fixes.

Linus mentioned in the email that if there is no unexpected situation, he plans to officially release Linux Kernel 6.0 next week.

From the version number point of view, Linux Kernel 6.0 is of course a major version update, but the much-watched Rust will not be merged into the next major version. At the Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, Linus said that unless something unexpected happens, Rust will go to Linux 6.1, but “just the core infrastructure.” Western Digital engineers demonstrated at the Linux Plumbers conference an NVMe driver developed in Rust, which has achieved performance comparable to the C-language version. Linux kernel developers also agree that Rust on Linux is ready.