Here's everything you need to know about Linux 6.0

The most recent version, 6.0 of Linux, has arrived for testing, announced by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds explains in a statement to the public that “there's nothing fundamentally different about this release”[1] Despite adopting the new 6.0 number, which primarily acts as a means of identifying releases.

He says driver upgrades, including GPU, networking, and sound, account for nearly two-thirds of the changes. Filesystems and tooling are among the remaining improvements. And “just random changes all over” applies to any OS update in general.


Performance-focused Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, and AMD Threadripper processors have seen some upgrades, according to Phoronix[2], who also found many other changes.

Torvalds had intended that the Rust for Linux fixes would have been integrated with this release; nonetheless, we anticipate that developers are working to correct this, and subsequent versions may do so.


A full version of Linux 6.0-rc1 will be made available alongside macOS Ventura later this fall. Therefore eligible participants are asked to test it now. It was released on August 14, 2022. An early October 2022 debut is the current target date.

Torvalds computed out of curiosity that Linux 6.0-rc1 has "13,099 files modified, 1,280,295 insertions, [and] 341,210 deletions."

[1] https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2208.1/06638.html

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.0-rc1-Released