Linux 6.16-rc2 Released With An Initial Batch Of Fixes

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 15 June 2025 at 05:04 PM EDT. Add A Comment

Following the release of Linux 6.16-rc1 last Sunday that capped off the Linux 6.16 merge window, Linux 6.16-rc2 is now available with an initial week's worth of bug/regression fixes. Linux 6.16 development continues in aiming toward a stable release around the end of July.

With Linux 6.16-rc2 there is a wide range of different bug/regression fixes in addressing early fallout post-merge-window. Some new changes in Linux 6.16-rc2 include fixing up the power management code for a CPU idle SMT-related regression introduced back in Linux 6.15, more Bcachefs file-system fixes, disabling DAMON by default after it got enabled back during the merge window, and various other bug/regression fixes.

👁 Linux 6.16-rc2 Git tag

See our Linux 6.16 feature overview for a look at all of the prominent kernel changes and new hardware support additions to find with this next version of the Linux kernel.

Update: Linus Torvalds has now posted his 6.16-rc2 announcement this Father's Day:

"Pretty quiet week, with a pretty small rc2 as a result. That's not uncommon, and things tend to pick up at rc3, but this is admittedly even smaller than usual.

It may be that people are taking a breather after a fairly sizable merge window, but it might also be seasonal, with Europe starting to see summer vacations... We'll see how this goes.

The diffstat looks somewhat unusual, with a lot of one-liners with both ARC and pincontrol having (presumably independently) ended up doing some unrelated trivial cleanups.

But even that is probably noticeable only because everything else is pretty small. That "everything else" is mostly network drivers (and bluetooth) and bcachefs, with some rust infrastructure and core networking changes thrown in."