Following lots of AI/LLM-assisted fixes in recent weeks , this week was yet another busy week with lots of code churn driven by coding agents. Linux networking still saw significantly bigger pull requests due to the AI/LLM coding agent contributions. Also merged this week were more USB device quirks , hiding documentation on the "clearcpuid" kernel parameter , and support for the ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II and Nova 2 Lite Controllers gaming controllers .
Linus Torvalds wrote in today's 7.1-rc6 announcement :
"Well, I wouldn't call this "small", but it is certainly smaller than rc5 was. And I don't think there's anything particularly scary here, so maybe we're still on track for a normal release cycle. Let's see.
Things look pretty normal except for the larger-than-I'd-wish-for size (which I guess technically is "normal" these days too). The bulk of the changes are drivers all over the place - GPU, networking, usb, serial, sound, scsi ... A little bit of everything.
There's also core networking and selftest updates. The rest is pretty much spread out: architecture fixes (x86, mips, arm64 - mainly kvm), filesystem fixes (smb, nfs), and some other random fixes (mm, liveupdate)."
Take a look at the Linux 7.1 features for learning more about all the exciting changes coming with this stable kernel version due out in June.