The Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel is now available for closing out the month of May and approaching the Linux 7.1 stable release that should be out by mid-June.

Following lots of AI/LLM-assisted fixes in recent weeks, this week was yet another busy week with lots of code churn driven by coding agents. Linux networking still saw significantly bigger pull requests due to the AI/LLM coding agent contributions. Also merged this week were more USB device quirks, hiding documentation on the "clearcpuid" kernel parameter, and support for the ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II and Nova 2 Lite Controllers gaming controllers.

Linus Torvalds wrote in today's 7.1-rc6 announcement:

"Well, I wouldn't call this "small", but it is certainly smaller than rc5 was. And I don't think there's anything particularly scary here, so maybe we're still on track for a normal release cycle. Let's see.

Things look pretty normal except for the larger-than-I'd-wish-for size (which I guess technically is "normal" these days too). The bulk of the changes are drivers all over the place - GPU, networking, usb, serial, sound, scsi ... A little bit of everything.

There's also core networking and selftest updates. The rest is pretty much spread out: architecture fixes (x86, mips, arm64 - mainly kvm), filesystem fixes (smb, nfs), and some other random fixes (mm, liveupdate)."

Take a look at the Linux 7.1 features for learning more about all the exciting changes coming with this stable kernel version due out in June.