The Linux kernel has just been updated and is now usable for the new month.
With a variety of performance enhancements, new hardware support, security updates, and the customary selection of file-system modifications, Linux 6.0 makes a strong start for the 6.x series.
“As is presumably evident to everyone, the major version number change is more about me running out of fingers and toes than it is about any substantial fundamental changes,” Linus Torvalds wrote in a message announcing the release on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.
“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.
Read on for a little more information on what’s new in the Linux kernel 6.0.
The 6.0 Linux Kernel’s Features
Thanks to scheduler adjustments and other kernel energy modifications, Phoronix benchmarking shows noticeable performance improvements across Intel Xeon “Ice Lake,” AMD Ryzen “Threadripper,” and AMD EPYC processors. It’s always a pleasure to see Linux wring more performance out of less.
By setting the foundation for a wide range of future devices, Linux 6.0 also performs some necessary future-proofing. This includes support for Intel’s 13th generation “Raptor Lake” core CPUs and its fourth generation “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon server chips.
For the RDNA 3 GPU, AMD offers a kernel graphics driver. For AMD ‘Raphael’ platforms, a new audio driver is also available, while AMD ‘Jadeite’ systems get better audio support. If utilising Linux 6.0, users of laptops with Ryzen 6000 series processors should once again experience normal keyboard functionality.
PCI bus support is added to the OpenRISC and LoongArch architectures, while RISC-cache V’s block management skills are improved by a number of additional extensions, including the “Zicbom” extension.
Additionally, RISC-V includes a new default setup that can immediately run Docker out of the box.
Support is beginning to grow for the (expensive) Lenovo ThinkPad X13s notebook, which utilises the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3. The ThinkPad X13s comes pre-installed with Windows 11 for ARM, however given that Linux support is now in its infancy, this might be an excellent reference device for fans of Linux on ARM.
Speaking of laptops used by Linux aficionados, several TUXEDO Computers and Clevo models had problems when restarting from suspend with their touchpads and keyboards. Linux 6.0 now has those issues resolved.
The XP-PEN Deco L drawing tablet, a wide range of sensors on AMD motherboards, including Sensor Fusion Hub support on more recent Ryzen laptops, and functional Thunderbolt on Intel Raptor Lake are just a few examples of the new hardware that is supported.
I wanted to point out that Linux 6.0 supports two new ioctl() procedures called EXT4 IOC GETFSUUID and EXT4 IC SETFSUUID as ext4 is still the primary file system in Ubuntu. These enable getting or setting of the UUID kept in a filesystem superblock.
Additional modifications in Linux 6.0 include:
NVMe in-band authentication is supported by the kernel’s runtime verification subsystem.
kernel driver for the Raspberry Pi 4
User-space block driver IO uring
XFS file systems with buffered writes
Along with a whole lot more, Send Protocol V2 support for the Btrfs H.265/HEVC API been promoted to stable. For a high-level overview, I suggest reading Phoronix’s feature overview; for further information, I suggest delving through the exhaustive LWN merging reports 1 and 2.
Obtain Linux 6.0
Linux 6.0 is currently available for download as source code, which you can manually compile on your preferred distribution? unable to do that? Wait for the maintainer of your distro to package the half-graft instead. New kernel upgrades are released by some distributions (like Arch) quite promptly while not by others (like Ubuntu).
To install Linux 6.0 on Ubuntu-based distributions, you can take a chance and use Canonical’s mainline repository (though keep in mind these do not come with any warranty or guarantee of support).
