Last weekend the Linux 6.8 merge window paused due to Linus Torvalds losing Internet connectivity and electricity. It lasted for the better part of the week but then managed to get back to work and now thankfully has been back online albeit with intermittent electrical issues following a brutal winter storm.

Fortunately this was the second week of the merge window that is far less busy than the first when a lot of new code is submitted. He's been merging in new feature pulls the back-half of this week and it looks like he'll be on track still for closing the merge window tomorrow and subsequently releasing Linux 6.8-rc1.

Linus Torvalds posted on Friday night that his power is hopefully back for good and that while hs still has to go through a handful of pull requests, " no reason to believe that I won’t close the merge window normally on Sunday. "

So barring any last minute surprises, Linux 6.8-rc1 will be out tomorrow, 21 January. Linux 6.8 is a very exciting kernel version with adding the Intel Xe DRM kernel driver in its experimental form, higher clocking for Intel Meteor Lake CPUs, various new Intel and AMD platform support, Nintendo NSO controller support, a Rust toolchain upgrade, improvements to Bcachefs, and other promising performance work.