Linux 6.0 debuts, missing some Rusty bits and a magic mushroom reference

Don't read the diffstat too closely, says Linus Torvalds – it's mostly another massive AMD update

Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn't mind what you call it.

"After I had already decided to call this kernel 6.0, a few Chinese developers piped up and pointed out that '5.20' is a more wholesome version of the Western '4.20' internet-famous number," he wrote in his announcement that Linux 6.0 rc1 has been released.

"4.20" is a reference to a day on which some celebrate marijuana, while "5.20" does likewise for magic mushrooms.

"So if you want to call this 'Linux 5.20', go right ahead," Torvalds wrote.

"Because the kernel version numbers really are entirely made up and have no intrinsic meaning."

That this week's release has the 6.0 label is still nice to know, as discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list in recent weeks used 5.20 and 6.0 interchangeably.

As The Register has already reported, the release does not make major changes to the kernel but does include many useful updates – such as more RISC-V support, code to drive Intel's Gaudi accelerators, and improved ACPI handling.

Torvalds lamented some Rust-enabling code didn't make it into the release.

"I actually was hoping that we'd get some of the first rust infrastructure, and the multi-gen LRU VM, but neither of them happened this time around," he mused, before observing "There's always more releases."

"This is one of those releases where you should not look at the diffstat too closely, because more than half of it is yet another AMD GPU register dump," he added, noting that Intel's Gaudi2 Ai processors are also likely to produce plenty of similar kernel additions.

"The CPU people also show up in the JSON files that describe the perf events, but they look absolutely tiny compared to the 'asic_reg' auto-generated GPU and AI hardware definitions," he added.

The release includes 13,099 changed files, 1,280,295 insertions and 341,210 deletions. Torvalds calculated those numbers "just because I was curious and looked."

He wants you to be curious too – or at least curious enough to test the kernel, because that's what release candidates are for and this one contains at least one active bug. ®