Linux 6.10 Features Include TPM Bus Encryption, More AMD Zen 5 & A Prison Letter Merge Request
File-Systems / Storage:
- Better zero-copy performance with IO_uring.
- Faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption on recent Intel and AMD CPus thanks to having new AVX-512, VAES, and other optimized implementations.
- Zone Write Plugging (ZWP) for better performance.
- Better performance when opening unencrypted files on file-systems supporting FSCRYPT encryption like EXT4 and F2FS.
- Cleaning up the ReiserFS README via a prison letter from convicted murderer Hans Reiser.
- Bcachefs prepping for online fsck and more safety improvements.
- EXT4 FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH support.
- XFS expanding its online repair support.
- F2FS will perform better on zoned storage setups.
- Btrfs restores the "norecovery" mount option due to breakage in user-space with the likes of systemd and YaST.
- Bug fixes for the modern NTFS driver (Paragon's NTFS3).
- Device Mapper's DM-Crypt now supports a "high priority" flag for better throughput and latency.
- NFSD optimizations and preparations for the new nfsdctl user-space utility.
- NFS v2 client support is now disabled by default.
- VirtIO-FS multi-queue support with FUSE.
- Improved write performance for OCFS2.
Linux Gaming:
- Steam Deck IMU support for the Steam Deck motion sensors along with ASUS ROG Ally HID support.
- The NTSYNC driver was merged for emulating Windows NT synchronization primitives. But the driver isn't yet in usable form by Wine / Steam Play (Proton) as more patches are still pending.
- Support for the Machenike G5 Pro gaming controller.
- Support for more ARM-based handheld game consoles.
Other Linux Hardware:
- Sound support on the ASUS ROG 2024 laptops as well as the Lenovo ThinkPad 13X.
- A Lenovo ThinkStation driver for exposing hardware monitoring on Lenovo ThinkStation workstations.
- NZXT Kraken 2023 AIO CPU cooler support for hardware monitoring.
- Framework 13 and Framework 16 support within the ChromeOS Platform Driver.
- The staging area has dropped some broken and unused drivers for lowering the kernel line count by some 19 thousand lines.
- Supporting another USB to parallel port adapter.
- Support for resetting CXL devices.
- Many laptop/platform driver enhancements including Acer Aspire One ARM64 EC laptop support.
- More Compute Express Link functionality is now in place thanks to all of the Intel engineering work around CXL.
- The Intel IPU6 driver is finally upstreamed in working toward better supporting the web cameras on many modern Intel laptops under Linux.
- Firewire / IEEE-1394 improvements are still happening in 2024.
- New Intel networking hardware support along with other new networking bits and more WiFi 7 hardware with Linux 6.10.
General Kernel Enhancements:
- Various VirtIO improvements.
- Linux will print the number of populated memory slots at boot time.
- Better handling for when things "go seriously wrong" on big servers by allowing more machine check records to be stored on high core count servers.
- Support for posted interrupts on bare metal hardware.
- Removing sysctl sentinel bloat from the kernel.
- Upgrading to the Rust 1.78 toolchain and other Rust for Linux kernel additions.
- Continued improvements to the SLUB allocator.
Security:
- Mseal as the new memory sealing system call that can be used by the likes of C libraries and web browsers for memory sealing akin to what's been available on some of the BSDs.
- The Linux kernel's hardening configuration is expanded to include enabling Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) and other protections.
- TPM bus encryption and integrity protection for fending off Trusted Platform Module attacks.
Linux 6.10 benchmarks are now firing up at Phoronix. The Linux 6.10 stable kernel should be out around the middle of July.
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