Due to agenda issues, here at Ubunlog we do not publish the releases of the last two Linux RCs. But the releases of stable versions are something else and it is something that we have to publish no matter what. A few hours ago, Linus Torvalds has made official the launch of Linux 6.6, and it has arrived, as always, with improvements and adding support for new hardware, among which there are points for Intel, AMD and other manufacturers.
Although Torvalds does not mention it, it is also something that he does not usually decide, Linux 6.6 should be the LTS version of 2023, since this year there have been none. Looking at the calendar, there is still material time left for 6.7 to be released, but everything should fit together perfectly so that the next kernel version arrives on December 31st. What you have below is the list with the new arrivals most notable that have arrived with Linux 6.6.
Linux 6.6 Highlights
Processors:
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- Merged the EEVDF scheduler to replace the CFS scheduler code.
- AMD Zen 5 temperature and EDAC support for AMD Family 1Ah processors.
- Support for AMD Dynamic Boost Control.
- Unnecessary kernel panics are avoided on AMD Zen systems.
- Intel cluster scheduling is reintroduced for modern Core hybrid CPUs.
- Intel Shadow Stack was finally merged for this CPU security feature with recent Intel/AMD CPUs that helps prevent ROP attacks.
- Work queue updates that help modern AMD CPUs and other systems with multiple L3 caches/last level caches.
- CPU usage statistics by CPU cgroup are now tracked correctly.
- CPUFreq performance boost control by policy instead of a single global control.
- AmpereOne core PMU perf events support.
- Intel Grand Ridge and Sierra Forest performance event code.
- Several new LoongArch CPU features new kernel bits enabled to work on Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) support.
- New KVM virtualization features.
- Support for Intel Sapphire Rapids PECI.
- A micro-optimization for AMD CPUs without ERMS.
- The cpupower utility supports the new AMD P-State features and there are other power management updates as well.
- Partial SMT enablement which is useful for some processors such as IBM POWER.
- Support for Intel Agilex 5 FPGAs and Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 Gen 2.
- Recorders:
- Better protection against nefarious behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary driver.
- AMD FreeSync Panel Replay support as a new alternative technology to Panel Self Refresh for laptops.
- AMDGPU DC now relies on RISC-V for that driver display code.
- Intel Meteor Lake graphics enablement continued.
- Nouveau uAPI additions for the NVK Vulkan driver.
- Initial support for the Intel Lunar Lake VPU4.
- The DRM CI to have in the continuous integration (CI) code tree to help facilitate testing of the Direct Rendering Manager code.
- Various other kernel graphics driver updates.
- Games on Linux:
- The widely used XPad input driver supports more drivers.
- A rumble/force feedback controller for Google Stadia controller connected via Bluetooth or WiFi.
- Support for other gaming peripherals such as the SteelSeries Arctis 1 Xbox headset and battery reports for the NVIDIA SHIELD controller.
- New sound support for AMD Van Gogh with SOF and also support for Valve "Galileo".
- Storage and file systems:
- ReiserFS was declared deprecated and will likely be retired in 2025.
- KSMBD is no longer experimental for that SMB server in the kernel.
- CephFS has added support for FSCRYPT after years of effort.
- The SMB client now allows you to adjust the cache time of directory contents.
- FUSE adds initial support for statx with file birth/creation times.
- A nice performance optimization for EXT4.
- DEFLATE compression for EROFS.
- New Tmpfs features.
- NFSD enables NFSv4.2 READ_PLUS by default.
- XFS starts landing online repair support.
- There is a new XFS version manager.
- “Pretty juicy” improvements to IOmap.
- Fixes in Btrfs.
- It's now easier to disable IO_uring system-wide.
- IO_uring support for vectorized FUTEX waits.
- Other hardware:
- Many new networking features and new wired/wireless hardware support.
- The USB MIDI 2.0 gadget feature driver has been merged, while the USB subsystem updates also include previous Lunar Lake USB work.
- Support for Cirrus Logic CS42L43 audio codec.
- New ASUS laptop features with its x86 platform driver.
- An HP BIOS settings driver “hpbioscfg” that allows you to manage some system BIOS settings from within Linux, similar to existing drivers from Lenovo and Dell.
- AMD patches to generate DeviceTree nodes for PCI devices.
- The Intle IVSC driver is added for the Intel Visual Sensing Controller with modern laptops.
- Support voltage and temperature sensors for more desktop motherboards.
- Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake sound support.
- Better handling of unresponsive Intel QAT devices.
- Security:
- Randomized Kmalloc caches for further system hardening.
- SELinux now removes references to the US National Security Agency (NSA) which initiated Security Enhanced Linux.
- The kernel now unconditionally enables x86 CPU microcode loading support.
- RISC-V now supports KASLR for kernel address space layout randomization to provide greater security along with other RISC-V improvements.
- Others:
- Another update to the Rust toolchain.
- Multigrain timestamps are introduced.
- The new system call fchmodat2.
- Sysctl bloat cleanup.
- The GenPD subsystem is introduced.
- Microsoft Hyper-V support for AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX guests.
- The make xconfig interface has been ported to Qt6 while maintaining compatibility with the Qt 5.15 LTS toolset.
- Printk cleanups in work towards threaded/atomic console print support which is needed to finally unlock real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support on mainline.
Linux 6.6 can now be downloaded from The Linux Kernel Archives for manual installation. Ubuntu users who don't want to do it this way can use Mainline Kernels.