Linux 6.13 Features: AutoFDO+Propeller Optimizations, Many AMD Additions & SDUC + NVMe 2.1 Support
Other Hardware Improvements/Additions:
- Platform profile support for newer Dell/Alienware systems.
- Case insensitive file support for Tmpfs to help with Steam Play and Flatpaks.
- Expanding atomic write support for EXT4 and XFS.
- Improved USB4 debugging support.
- SoundWire DisCo 2.0 support preparations.
- AMD I3C controller ACPI support for the DesignWare driver.
- RDMA changes with NVIDIA's Data Direct Placement (DDP) feature for Mellanox adapters.
- Improved logic for trusting built-in Thunderbolt controllers.
- The Intel-developed PCIe cooling driver has been merged for reducing the PCI Express bandwidth when needed due to hardware running hot in order to help with cooling.
- New sound hardware support for AMD, Allwinner, Cirrus Logic, and other hardware.
- Corsair Void headset support.
- Kysona M600 mouse support and other new HID device support.
- Many wired and wireless networking driver improvements.
- Raspberry Pi Camera Front End "CFE" video capture support.
Storage / File-Systems:
- NVMe 2.1 support along with NVMe rotational media handling.
- Multi-grain timestamps are trying again and appear to be in better shape compared to the prior attempt and revert.
- NFS server scalability improvements.
- IO_uring adds hybrid I/O polling and ring resizing capabilities.
- Performance work for exFAT by reducing FAT chain traversal.
- Performance improvements for Btrfs.
- FUSE support to adjust the maximum size of FUSE requests.
- F2FS device aliasing as an interesting new feature.
- A big rework to the real-time volumes handling with the XFS file-system.
- Some nice file performance optimizations.
- Support for Ultra Capacity SD cards (SDUC) for up to 128TB of storage.
Virtualization:
- Enhancing interactions between Intel TDX guests and VMMs.
- Eliminating an "awful idea" within the KVM code along with various x86_64 Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements.
- Virtual CPUFreq driver is introduced for helping with better power/performance within virtual machines.
- Preparing KVM nested guests support for IBM Power11 CPUs.
Other Kernel Changes:
- LLC and NUMA awareness for the sched_ext scheduler code.
- Linus Torvalds himself took to improving the futex code for enhancing user-space accesses.
- Reporting the number of hung tasks since boot.
- Clang AutoFDO and Propeller optimization support. The Linux kernel can now be built with these feedback-driven compiler optimizations by LLVM/Clang for enhancing the performance of the resulting kernel build once having profiled the workloads on your hardware.
- A lot of new Rust infrastructure code.
- Linux 6.13 has hit a "tipping point" with more Rust-based drivers expected to begin entering the mainline kernel now that more of the Rust infrastructure has been ironed out.
- Caching of large ROX pages for reducing TLB instruction pressure and helping with performance.
- MM performance optimizations.
- Quadrupling the workqueue concurrency limit.
- Lazy preemption support is introduced with Linux 6.13.
Removals:
- Clearing out 107k lines of code from old and unmaintained staging drivers, like dropping the old Fieldbus code.
- Deleting the ReiserFS file-system from the mainline kernel.
- What you won't find in Linux 6.13 though are the Bcachefs changes this cycle as they were blocked by the Code of Conduct committee with the CoC deciding to not honor pull requests from Bcachefs maintainer Kent Overstreet this cycle.
Now onto Linux 6.13 kernel performance benchmarking...
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