Linux 6.10 comes with many new hardware features, and among other things improves support for playing on Linux

Pablinux

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Linux 6.10

While on this side of the pond there were many of us who were already in Euro Cup mode and on the other they were preparing to enter that state but with the Copa América, Linus Torvalds continued his thing and launched Linux 6.10. Among the new developments, as is usual every two months or so, there are many, but perhaps one new development related to TPM draws attention. And many Linux users did not know what that was until Windows users complained about not being able to upgrade to the 11th version of the Windows system.

As usual, we are going to provide a list with all the news important features of Linux 6.10, one that was collected in its day Michael Larabel. In order not to make this article longer than necessary, we leave you with that list.

What's New in Linux 6.10

  • Graphics and displays:
    • Panthor's DRM driver is merged to support new Arm Mali GPUs that require firmware-based Command Stream Frontend (CSF).
    • Intel Adaptive Sync SDP.
    • Increased support for Intel Lunar Lake graphics/displays.
    • HDMI sound support for Intel Battlemage graphics cards.
    • An Intel low latency track to improve the performance of computing workloads.
    • Many other improvements to open source GPU drivers.
    • Improved AMD ROCm/AMDKFD support for “small” Ryzen APUs.
    • Configurable boot image compression for RISC-V, so BZ2/LZ4/LZMA/LZO/Zstd can be selected if desired rather than being limited to Gzip.
    • Support for new AMD GPUs on RISC-V hardware. RISC-V now has kernel-mode FPU support which is necessary for the AMDGPU Display Core to work with new AMD graphics cards that have DCN IP.
    • DisplayPort/eDP for the Qualcomm Snapdragon
  • Processors:
    • THP / mTHP, which results in higher performance.
    • Intel and AMD P-State driver updates with fixes and other improvements for CPU frequency scaling on modern Intel and AMD processors.
    • 64-bit ARM can now optionally disable 32-bit userspace support.
    • ARM64 support for building Flat Image Tree (FIT) images. FITs are the Linux kernel with the necessary DeviceTree that are easily distributed and can be booted with U-Boot, Coreboot and LinuxBoot.
    • RISC-V now supports Rust code in the Linux kernel build.
    • Support for RISC-V Milk-V Mars and various additions for ARM platforms.
    • Live migration for Intel QAT driver.
    • Intel HFI will stop wasting CPU cycles.
    • Perf tool updates for AMD Zen 5 CPUs along with updated events for new Intel CPU models.
    • More KVM preparations around Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX).
    • New hardware support within the Turbostat utility.
    • The x86 instruction decoder is now ready for APX and other new Intel x86_64 ISA additions.
    • x32 shadow stacks and other x86 changes.
    • Removing support for very old DEC Alpha hardware.
    • Support for PowerPC 40x processors is removed from the main core.
  • File systems and storage:
    • Better zero-copy performance with IO_uring.
    • Faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption on recent Intel and AMD CPUs thanks to new AVX-512, VAES and other optimized implementations.
    • Zone Write Plugging (ZWP) for better performance.
    • Zstd compression for EROFS.
    • Better performance when opening unencrypted files on file systems that support FSCRYPT encryption such as EXT4 and F2FS.
    • Cleaning the ReiserFS README via a prison letter from convicted murderer Hans Reiser.
    • Bcachefs prepares for online fsck and more security improvements.
    • Support for EXT4 FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH.
    • XFS expands its online repair support.
    • F2FS will work best in zoned storage configurations.
    • Btrfs restores the "norecovery" mount option due to breakage in userspace with the likes of systemd and YaST.
    • Bug fixes for the modern NTFS driver (Paragon's NTFS3).
    • Device Mapper's DM-Crypt now supports a "high priority" flag for better performance and latency.
    • NFSD optimizations and preparations for the new nfsdctl userspace utility.
    • NFS v2 client support is now disabled by default.
    • VirtIO-FS multi-queue support with FUSE.
    • Improved write performance for OCFS2.
  • Games on Linux:
    • Steam Deck IMU support for Steam Deck motion sensors along with ASUS ROG Ally HID support.
    • The NTSYNC driver was merged to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives. But the driver is not yet in usable form for Wine/Steam Play (Proton) as more patches are still pending.
    • Support for Machenike G5 Pro game controller.
    • Support for more ARM-based handheld game consoles.
  • Other Linux hardware:
    • Sound support on ASUS ROG 2024 and Lenovo ThinkPad 13X laptops.
    • A Lenovo ThinkStation driver to expose hardware monitoring on Lenovo ThinkStation workstations.
    • NZXT Kraken 2023 AIO CPU cooler support for hardware monitoring.
    • Support for Framework 13 and Framework 16 in the ChromeOS platform driver.
    • Some broken and unused drivers have been removed to reduce the kernel line count by about 19 thousand lines.
    • Support for another USB to parallel port adapter.
    • Support for rebooting CXL devices.
    • Many improvements to laptop/platform drivers, including support for the Acer Aspire One ARM64 EC laptop.
    • More Compute Express Link functionality is now in place thanks to all of Intel's engineering work around CXL.
    • Intel's IPU6 driver has finally been updated to improve webcam support for many modern Intel laptops running Linux.
    • Firewire/IEEE-1394 improvements continue to occur in 2024.
    • New Intel networking hardware support along with other new networking bits and more WiFi 7 hardware with Linux 6.10.
  • General kernel improvements:
    • Various improvements to VirtIO.
    • Linux will print the number of memory slots occupied when booting.
    • Various programmer updates.
    • Better handling for when things "go seriously wrong" on large servers by allowing more machine check logs to be stored on high core count servers.
    • Support for published interrupts on bare metal hardware.
    • Removing sysctl sentinel bloat from the kernel.
    • Update to Rust 1.78 toolchain and other additions to the Rust core for Linux.
    • Continuous improvements to the SLUB allocator.
  • Security:
    • Mseal as the new memory sealing system call that can be used by C libraries and web browsers for memory sealing similar to what has been available in some of the BSDs.
    • Linux kernel security settings are expanded to include enabling Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) and other protections.
    • TPM bus encryption and integrity protection to prevent attacks on the Trusted Platform Module.

Now available

Linux 6.10 It is now available en kernel.org, but those who decide this route will have to carry out the manual installation. The best way to do it in Ubuntu is by Mainline Kernels, although we recommend, except in serious cases, to stay with the kernel offered by our distribution.