Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.8-rc7 as we close in on the Linux 6.8 stable release in the next week or two.
With prior weekly release candidates there were concerns raised by Torvalds that this might be a cycle needing to go with an extra “-rc8” candidate before declaring the stable kernel. But this week Linux 6.8-rc7 did tick on the smaller side and in turn Linus expressed the possibility of not needing 6.8-rc8, in which case the Linux 6.8 stable release would happen next Sunday on 10 March. But if things don’t go smoothly, Linux 6.8-rc8 would come then and then v6.8 the following Sunday.
It was rc6 that finally fixed the amdgpu bug that’s been annoying me for the past two months after I switched to a newer kernel than my distro came with in order to make some stupid ML stuff work. Probably it was the change described as “fix the runtime resume failure issue” I suppose. Whatever the problem was, it’s gone now. If your graphical session sometimes fails to come back after the monitors were powered off for a while, 6.8 may be the kernel for you.
That’s the problem with going out of your way to get a newer kernel. It has some new features but also some new bug and before you know it you’re spending Sunday nights compiling the latest rc builds straight from Linus.