“38.4 million lines of code across over 78,000 files.”
No blockbuster features this release, mostly bugfixes and incremental improvements. The interesting bits are ext4 getting roughly a third faster in certain operations and the kernel finally being able to offload sound decoding to USB hardware after years of effort. Torvalds warned his travel during the 6.17 merge window might cause disruptions, which is a polite reminder that the most important software project in computing history still has a bus factor of one.