Linux 6.19 Features: LUO, PCIe Link Encryption, ASUS Armoury, DRM Color Pipeline API & More
Linux Storage:
- EXT4 optimized online defragmentation and now supports block sizes larger than the kernel page size.
- Block layer improvements for peer-to-peer DMA contributed by NVIDIA.
- The NTFS3 driver will now support pre-1970 timestamps. There are also a number of other NTFS3 driver fixes.
- Per-CPU BIO caching by default to help with block performance.
- More performance optimizations for F2FS.
- Btrfs preparations for FSCRYPT support and some new experimental features.
- Microsoft RAMDAX was upstreamed as a new driver for carving out RAM as NVDIMM devices.
- NFS landed initial support for directory delegations that can help make some checks redundant for better efficiency.
- Better performance for DM-VERITY in the Device Mapper code thanks to much faster hashing performance.
- Allowing file-systems to increase the writeback chunk size.
- Corruption fixes for the Apple HFS/HFS+ file-system drivers.
Linux Networking:
- Up to a 4x improvement for heavy transfer workloads by replacing a busy lock at the transfer queuing layer with a lock-less list.
- Initial support for Bluetooth Periodic Advertising Sync Transfer (PAST).
- Realtek R8169 now supports the RTL8125K ASIC.
- The Realtek RTW89 WiFi driver now supports the RTL8852AU and RTL8852CU USB devices.
- The RTW89 driver also has initial support for the RTL8922DE ASIC.
- Synopsys STMMAC support for the ESWIN EIC7700 SoC networking.
- NVIDIA preparations for 1.6 Tb/s networking.
- Broadcom BNG_RE RoCE driver for their next-generation hardware.
Other Hardware:
- Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions support and configurable number of hibernation threads for faster hibernation handling.
- Improving various Logitech device support and adding a new driver for the Logitech G13.
- Support for the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro drawing tablet.
- The Uniwill laptop driver was upstreamed in providing more features under Linux for Uniwill laptops that is also the manufacturer of TUXEDO Computers laptops and more. The Unwill Linux driver provides battery charge rate limiting, RGB light-bar controls, hardware monitoring, better hotkey handling, and other features.
- The ASUS Armoury dirver is added to provide new BIOS attributes and other features for ASUS gaming hardware like the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld and an improvement over the existing ASUS WMI Linux driver support.
- Lenovo IdeaPad Rapid Charge support.
- Numerous other laptop and gaming handheld device improvements.
- New RTC drivers for Apple Silicon and NVIDIA hardware.
- New Rockchip RKCIF and RKVDEC HEVC media drivers.
- USB3 driver work for Apple Silicon hardware.
- Cleaning up the PCIe Resizable BAR "ReBAR" code.
- HDR support for I3C to support faster data transfers with this "High Data Rate" mode.
- Linux GPIB promoted out of staging for that General Purpose Interface Bus that has been around since the 1970s.
- Quirky Firewire IEEE-1394 device fixes.
- Mainline support for the StarFive VisionFive 2 Lite.
- Device Tree additions for more Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops.
- Temperature monitoring for the Steam Deck APU and the Apple Silicon SMC HWMON support.
Rust For Linux 6.19:
- Many driver core changes for Rust.
- I2C drivers can now be written in Rust.
- Rust kernel modules/drivers can now support module parameters.
- Printk improvements to speed-up boot times for some systems.
- Various other Rust for Linux updates.
Other Linux 6.19 Kernel Enhancements:
- Greater insight available with the hung task and system lock-up detectors.
- Many Microsoft Hyper-V improvements including the new "L1VH" mode so Linux can drive the hypervisor running the Azure Host directly.
- Removal of the kernel's "genocide" function.
- User-Space I/O "UIO" with shared virtual addressing (SVA).
- DMA-BUF support for VFIO PCI devices.
- A new console font to better handle modern laptop displays.
- Sched_ext now better copes with recovering from misbehaving eBPF schedulers.
- Enabling Microsoft C extensions support for the Linux kernel usage by default.
- The option of more detailed bug reporting but costing increased memory usage.
Linux Security:
- The Live Update Orchestrator was merged. LUO developed by Google builds atop the Kernel HandOver functionality as a new live update mechanism for the Linux kernel built atop Kexec.
- Kernel Credential Guards were merged.
- Adding klp-build as a livepatch module generation solution.
- Allow enforcing IPE security checks on indirectly executed scripts.
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