Linus Torvalds predicts that there will be “core new things” in Linux 6.0.

Although Linux 6.0 is a significant new kernel version, there are no significant changes. That will appear in Linux 6.1.

 

The stable release of Linux 6.0 has been announced by Linus Torvalds, who has noted that it is missing the “core new items” that will be included in Linux 6.1.

 

Torvalds has downplayed the significance of the major version number shift, which would have otherwise been 5.20, ever since the first release candidate (rc1) for Linux 6.0 in August. 6.0 has been referred to as a “pretty substantial release,” yet during a conference last month, he also stated that “I intended 6.0 to be dull.”

 

“So, as is hopefully evident to everyone, the major version number change is more about my running out of fingers and toes than it is about any large fundamental changes,” he said in an update on Sunday.

 

Linux 6.0 includes performance enhancements for AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper and AMD EPYC CPUs, Intel’s Ice Lake Xeon processors, and Phoronix noticed during the 6.0 merge window.

 

Additionally, there is new hardware support for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 as well as the Intel Sapphire Rapids, Raptor Lake, and Meteor Lake processors. Linux 6.0 improves RISC-V compatibility in a number of ways, while OpenRISC and Chinese LoongArch received hardware improvements.

 

“But of course there’s a lot of various changes in 6.0 – we’ve got over 15k non-merge commits in there in total, after all, and as such 6.0 is one of the bigger releases at least in numbers of commits in a while,” noted Torvalds.

 

The main development in Linux 6.1 is the addition of the Rust programming language to the Linux kernel, which should be among the “core new features” Torvalds notes. This enables programmers to create drivers and other components in Rust rather than using the C programming language by default.