As anticipated the Linux 6.16 kernel was promoted to stable. Linux 6.16 now greets the world with various performance improvements, NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell open-source GPU driver support in Nouveau, Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) preparations, and many other exciting enhancements.

Linux 6.16 is a great kernel update for the summer of 2025. I've already covered the Linux 6.16 highlights at length within the feature overview article of Linux 6.16 Features From NVIDIA Blackwell To Performance Improvements & Intel APX and then the short summary in Linux 6.16 Is Exciting For Open-Source NVIDIA, OpenVPN DCO & More Performance . Lots of great work as always. The Linux 6.16 source tree weighs in at 38.4 million lines in its source tree across 78.4k files, as measured by the cloc tool.

Linux 6.16 is available from git.kernel.org .

Now it's onward to the Linux 6.17 merge cycle of which there are many changes already on tap . Linux 6.17 will be particularly prominent as with its early October debut is anticipated to be the kernel powering Ubuntu 25.10 and should be the out-of-the-box kernel for Fedora 43 and other late 2025 Linux distribution releases.