Sometime around the end of May or the beginning of June, the final release of the Linux 6.15 kernel series will be officially released. Until then, testers and those who like to live on the very edge can kick the tires of the first release candidate (RC) version.

With the merge window closed for 6.15, it's now a great time to test the latest iteration of the Linux kernel, which includes Rust support for hrtimer (a kernel timer that provides high-precision, low-latency timing and scheduling capabilities in the Linux operating system); a new boot parameter for x86 CPUs, called setcpuid (allows a process to manipulate the CPUID signature, which provides information about the processor's architecture, features, and other details): improvements for both x86 Intel and AMD PMUs; better ACPI fan drivers; improved power management; better support for ARMv9 CPUs; ext4 now supports a new copy-on-write feature for improved performance;; a network stack that now supports IPv6 address generation and better handling of packet loss and congestion; improved Bluetooth support; and more.

On LWN.net, Torvalds had this to say about the release: "...while it's bigger than normal, it's not some kind of record-breaking thing: we've had bigger releases, although not many. The really big releases tend to be due to some long-running major development being finally merged after many years, and this is not that: this is just the "regular" kind of big." He continues by adding, "It's big in both number of commits and in lines changed. The stats look fairly normal, with – once again – another AMD GPU register header file drop adding a ton of lines and standing out. But while that is a big chunk in itself, it doesn't dominate the diff – there's a lot of changes all over."

You can download the 6.15 RC 1 kernel and compile it yourself or wait for it to be made available for your Linux distribution of choice.