Linux 6.18 Features: New AMD & Intel CPU Features, Rocket Driver, DM-PCACHE, Other New Drivers
Storage / File-Systems:
- Bcachefs is now removed from the mainline Linux kernel.
- Btrfs support for block size greater than page size.
- Better parallelism for read-heavy workloads with the Btrfs file-system.
- XFS enabling online fsck by default.
- A 150x speed-up for SquashFS lseek() around sparse copying.
- Performance improvements for Intel F2FS.
- A lockless bitmap option for software RAID (MD).
- Greater scalability for NFSD from low-cost clouds to high-end servers.
- A nice optimization for the exFAT driver for yielding a very nice ~16.x speed-up for loading time.
- Case-insensitive OverlayFS file-system support.
- SMB3 and KSMBD performance improvements.
- DM-PCACHE is upstreamed as a high throughput, low-latency direct access (DAX) read/write cache for Device Mapper.
- A gen_init_cpio optimization on Btrfs or XFS.
- Fixes for the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers.
- Various other file-system improvements.
- A fix for lock-ups when systemd units read lots of files.
- Atomic writes for md-linear.
Linux Networking:
- Google PSP encryption for TCP connections.
- Big improvements for servers encountering DDoS attacks.
- Qualcomm Packet Processing Engine "PPE" support in the mainline kernel.
- Various other networking improvements and new wired/wireless hardware support.
- Merging the AMD Pensando Ionic RDMA driver.
- Intel GEN3 support in their IRDMA driver for RDMA RoCEv2 with the IPU E2000 product line.
Linux On Laptops:
- Initial haptic touchpad support being contributed by Google.
- A new EC driver for the Snapdragon X Elite powered ThinkPad T14s Gen 6.
- A new driver for keyboards with Xiaomi Redmibook laptops to support an AI button, Fn keys, and other extra laptop keyboard functionality.
- A new HWMON driver for GPD handheld gaming devices.
Other Hardware:
- Intel USB IO expander drivers were upstreamed.
- Several new input drivers including for the touchscreen controller used by the Fairphone 5.
- The default Linux RISC-V kernel builds can now support front panel shutdown and reboot buttons connected via GPIO.
- An initial framework for USB driver Rust bindings.
- Realtek ECC engine driver is upstreamed.
- Red and green status LED support on QNAP NAS devices.
- CXL poison injection support to help with debugging Compute Express Link devices.
- Compress-Offload API support for the Opus audio codec.
- Qualcomm Iris driver support for H.264 and H.265 encode.
- Working sensor monitoring for more ASUS motherboards.
- Continued refinements to IEEE-1394 Firewire support.
- Sony DualSense controller audio jack handling.
Linux Security:
- Disabling TPM bus encryption by default due to performance reasons.
- BPF now supports signed programs and deferred task execution> along with other BPF improvements in Linux 6.18.
- Linux audit code now properly handles multiple Linux security modules (LSMs).
Other Linux 6.18 Changes:
- A new Python app within the kernel source tree as "ilist" for dealing with Linux perf events.
- Many memory management improvements.
- A new "transitional" feature for helping with Linux kernel configurations (Kconfig) handling.
- Sched_ext preparations for cgroup sub-scheduler support.
- A lot of new Rust code continues entering the mainline Linux kernel, including the new Rust Binder driver from Google for Android.
Now on to kicking off some Linux 6.18 Git kernel benchmarking...
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