Linux 6.17-rc3 Released: "A Bit Larger Than Usual"

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 24 August 2025 at 01:26 PM EDT. 7 Comments

Linux 6.17 is one step closer to release with Linus Torvalds having issued Linux 6.17-rc3 already today to currently traveling in Europe.

Linux 6.17-rc3 is out a few hours early today. This week brought HP Victus 16-r1000 gaming laptop fan and thermal profile support alongside various other fixes. For the most part it was routine bug/regression fixes for the week with not too much else standing out.

👁 Linux 6.17-rc3 Git tag

Linus Torvalds commented in the 6.17-rc3 announcement:

"I'm still traveling for family reasons, so slightly unusual timing for rc3, but it's (barely) afternoon here on the East coast, so the usual Sunday afternoon schedule technically still holds.

As suspected, rc3 ends up being a bit larger than usual, to balance out the tiny rc2. Yes, 3.17 seems to be generally in pretty good shape, but nobody *really* believed that it was as good as that tiny rc2 would make it seem.

And while rc3 is on the larger side, it's by no means anything outrageously so, it's well within the normal parameters.

The diffstat looks fairly normal too: about half drivers (spread all over, we've got a bit of everything, but mellanox mlx5 stands out if you want to pick out any particular area). There's a fair chunk of added selftests and some more Rust support, and then a random collection of fixes all over: architecture code, filesystems, VM and core networking.

Anyway, things seem fairly normal for this phase in the release cycle, nothing stands out. Please keep testing,"

Linux 6.17 stable will be out around the end of September. See our Linux 6.17 feature overview for a look at all the interesting changes coming to this next kernel release.