Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.16 Release Candidate.
The final release of the Linux 6.16 kernel series is expected in late July or early August 2025.
Today, Linus Torvalds announced the general availability of the first Release Candidate development milestone of the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel series for public testing.
Two weeks have passed since the release of Linux kernel 6.15, which means that Linux 6.16’s merge window is now closed, and the time has come to test drive the Release Candidate (RC) development versions, which will be published every Sunday until the final release in about two months from today.
Some of the highlights of the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel series include a new systemd service to run cpupower, lots of changes for the bcachefs file system, Intel Auto Counter Reload (ACR) support, Intel APX support, a new HD-audio control bound via ACPI for NVIDIA, and support for NVIDIA Hopper/Blackwell GPUs to nouveau.
Linux 6.16 also promises support for hardware-wrapped keys to fscrypt, support for Intel QAT hardware accelerators in EROFS to improve DEFLATE decompression performance, support for AMD ACP 7.x and a wider range of Intel AVS platforms, as well as Tegra264 support in the ADMA driver.
