Linux 6.15 Features Deliver A Lot For Intel & AMD, Many Other Changes
Linux Networking:
- IO_uring network zero-copy receive support.
- An MCTP transport driver for MCTP over USB.
- Intel Killer E5000 Ethernet support.
- Airoha RISC-V network packet processing unit support.
- Many other wired and wireless network driver improvements including support for the Realtek RTL8814AE and RTL8814AU and other ASICs.
Other Hardware:
- The new FWCTL subsystem is introduced.
- Various laptop support improvements like adding a Samsung Galaxy Book driver and Huawei Matebook E Go EC support.
- Apple Z2 touchscreen and Touch Bar driver for input on some Apple mobile devices and the Touch Bar for the M-Series Apple Silicon devices.
- A backlight driver for various Apple mobile devices.
- Better handling for the Sony PlayStation 5 controllers.
- The new Parade PS883X driver is among the USB and Thunderbolt updates.
- Improvements to the GPIB bus code.
- Sensor monitoring for the AMD BC-250 and an ASUS X670E motherboard.
- SoundWire Bulk Register Access (BRA) support for allowing higher bandwidth operation.
- A lot of other new sound hardware support.
- A Lenovo ThinkEdge SE30 watchdog driver is added.
- PCI drivers for the Agilex PCIe controller and AMD Multimedia DMA Bridge.
- Microsoft Hyper-V support for running as the root partition and the ability to offline CPU cores within the context of Hyper-V VMs using Linux.
- The Qualcomm Iris video decode driver was merged along with DesignWare HDMI input support.
Linux Security:
- MSEAL protection of system mappings for enhancing security on Chrome OS, Android, and other high-security Linux platforms.
- AMD Zen 5 SRSO mitigation handling for KVM.
- ARM64 flips around Spectre BHB mitigation handling for the AArch64 processors.
General Kernel Improvements:
- Many kernel scheduler improvements can be found in Linux 6.15.
- Kbuild support for LoongArch 64-bit Debian and faster gendwarfksyms usage.
- A new "hugetlb_alloc_threads" boot option that can help speed-up Linux boot times.
- Updates to the Rust driver core bindings and various other Rust language additions.
- Support for latency profiling with perf.
- Zstd 1.5.7 provides updated Zstandard compression/decompression support.
- A null TTY default build option for those building the kernel without VT support.
Removals / Spring Cleaning:
- Removal of the old IBM CXL/CAPI drivers.
- IBM removed Cell Blade server support.
With the Linux 6.15 merge window over, now on to Linux 6.15 benchmarking and other performance testing at Phoronix.
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