Linux 6.11 Kernel Features Deliver A Lot For New/Upcoming Intel & AMD Hardware
Storage / File-Systems:
- DM-VERITY multi-buffer hasing for better performance.
- Block atomic writes for NVMe and SCSI storage.
- Optimized flushing for Device Mapper.
- New Bcachefs features like a disk accounting rewrite and self-healing on read I/O errors.
- A nice performance optimization for EXT4.
- The NTFS driver prepares FileAttr support.
- UBIFS hardening against power loss.
- A VFS fix for corruption or security issues as a five year old bug fix.
Linux On Laptops:
- Better Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS ARM laptop support thanks to the new EC code.
- Fan speed and temperature and charge control for the Chrome OS driver to help with Framework laptops.
- A ChromeOS EC LED driver also to benefit Framework Laptops.
- Keyboard backlight support for more T2-equipped Apple Macs.
- Linux 6.11 EFI will fake that it's booting Apple macOS for some dual-GPU Macs to avoid issues.
- The Snapdragon X1 powered ASUS Vivobook S15 and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x have DeviceTree support with Linux 6.11 but various features/functionality are missing for both of those X1 Elite laptops.
Other Hardware:
- ASUS EC Sensors driver for the ProArt X670E CREATOR WIFI motherboard.
- The Dell PC Extras driver will provide extra functionality on Dell systems like fan mode control support for some models.
- New HID drivers and more HID BPF capabilities.
- The Raspberry Pi PiSP driver for the Raspberry Pi 5 camera system.
- New wired and wireless networking hardware is supported by the Linux 6.11 kernel.
- Realtek RT1318 audio support.
- USB and Thunderbolt improvements.
- Defaulting to a better SATA link power management policy.
Other Kernel Innovations:
- Greater control over swapiness behavior with a new "swapiness" argument for memory reclaim.
- Preparations for Device Memory TCP.
- A new baseline for the Rust toolchain / infrastructure as a minimum version moving forward for compiling the Rust kernel code.
- VMware Hypercall API support.
- New power sequencing driver subsystem.
- Many MM optimizations and improvements.
- With the upstream kernel it's now easy to build a Pacman kernel package for Arch Linux use.
Linux Security:
- More Arm CPU cores need the speculative SSBS workaround.
- A new Spectre BHI mitigation option intended for cloud environments.
- Implementing getrandom() in the vDSO.
- Tightening /proc/[pid]/mem access for better system security.
- A dedicated bucket allocator for better security.
- The FineIBT default configuration is now tunable at build time.
- Fixing a Landlock sandboxed app security issue where apps could remove restrictions on itself.
Now onto more Linux 6.11 kernel testing and benchmarking... More Linux 6.11 performance results in upcoming articles on Phoronix.
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