On a Windows computer, if you want to add support for a new piece of hardware, you install some drivers. In Linux, things are a bit different, usually the drivers come included in the Linux kernel and if you have newer hardware, you usually have to wait until support is added to a later kernel.

On Sunday, Linus Torvalds announced the availability of the seventh release candidate of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel. He said that things look very normal and that most of the changes are in the drivers, especially sound, DRM and subsystems like USB and network.

Outside of drivers, Torvalds said changes mainly affected filesystems, architectures (mostly x86), documentation, small kernel network fixes, and some self-tests.

According to Phoronix, this “very normal” estimate from Torvalds could suggest we’ll get the final release of Linux 6.9 next week instead of having to go to an eighth release candidate, but there’s always the other way around if any major issues crop up. .

Although it may be late in the Linux 6.9 cycle, that doesn’t mean new features aren’t being added. ASUS ROG Raikiri controller owners will be able to use this Xbox/PC controller with Linux 6.9-rc7+ after support has just been added. There is also better support for the upcoming Lunar Lake platform.

It will depend on which Linux distribution you are running when you get the Linux 6.9 update. Those on bleeding edge rolling distributions based on Arch should see this first and then on non-rolling modern release distributions like Fedora. It’s not clear if Ubuntu LTS will get it via a hardware activation update later.

Let us know in the comments if you will try to upgrade to this kernel or if you will stick with the one provided out of the box by your distro.

source: Kernel.org Through Furonics and Furonics