Linux 7.0 Features Include More Preparations For AMD Zen 6 & Intel Nova Lake
Linux 7.0 Storage + File-Systems:
- Btrfs delivers an experimental remap-tree feature.
- Autonomous self-healing capabilities for XFS.
- EXT4 improves write performance for concurrent direct I/O writes.
- Performance optimizations for F2FS.
- eCryptfs is back to seeing upstream patch activity.
- Dynamic thread pool sizing for the NFS server.
- Ceph preparations for AES256K keys.
- Power sequencing driver for PCIe M.2 connectors.
- 8D-8D-8D octal DTR support for SPI NAND.
- Non-blocking timestamps and standardized generic I/O error reporting.
- NULLFS and OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE were merged.
Linux 7.0 Performance Optimizations:
- Scheduler changes for performance and scalability.
- Improving the workqueue (WQ) rescuer.
- Performance optimizations in the memory management code.
- Sheaves are ready to play a bigger role in the Linux kernel.
- Speeding up reclaiming of file-backed large folios by as much as 50~75%.
- A significant improvement to the close_range system call.
Linux 7.0 Networking:
- A nice UDP network performance improvement from inlining a function.
- CAKE_MQ as a multi-queue aware sch_cake.
- Realtek RTL8127ATF 10G Fiber SFP support.
- Qualcomm QCC2072 support in the Ath12k driver.
- Airoha AN8811HB 2.5 Gbps PHY support.
Other Linux 7.0 Hardware Changes:
- Sensor monitoring for more ASUS motherboards.
- Rock Band 4 PS4/PS5 guitar support.
- UCSI Thunderbolt Alt mode support.
- Apple USB Type-C PHY support as well as PHY support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite hardware.
- Cleaning up the Realtek RTL8723BS 802.11b/g/n WiFi driver is still ongoing.
- Various laptop enhancements by way of the x86 platform drivers tree.
- Various media driver updates.
Linux 7.0 Virtualization:
- Microsoft Hyper-V improvements including the integrated scheduler support.
- Support for virtualizing AMD ERAPS.
Rust For Linux 7.0:
- More driver core improvements for Rust.
- Officially concluding the Rust for Linux experiment with Rust in the Linux kernel being here to stay.
Linux 7.0 Security:
- Various AppArmor enhancements are now upstream.
- ML-DSA quantum-resistant signature support for kernel modules.
Linux 7.0 Removals:
- .
- Retiring of the IBM Mwave modem driver from 90's ThinkPads.
- Removing the last parallel port Ethernet driver.
- Dropping the old Intel 440BX EDAC driver for old Intel Pentium processors due to the code being broken for about two decades.
- Dropping support for signing modules with SHA-1.
Other Linux 7.0 Changes:
- Making it easier to monitor energy usage for a group of tasks.
- Easier replacing of the Tux logo during the kernel boot process via new Kconfig options.
- Compiler-driven static analysis locking context checking is merged.
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