After a time in which he was fooling around with the numbering of 5.20, Linus Torvalds half-surprised himself by releasing the first RC of 6.0, making it clear what the numbering of the version that would succeed it would be. 5.19. Now, some two months later, the father of Linux has released the first stable version of Linux 6.0. This was expected to be the first version to include Rust, but this adoption has been delayed. Even so, this version includes many new features and it is an important one.
With the first stable version already upon us, and while waiting for a point update to be released to recommend mass adoption, now is the time to write about what Linux 6.0 includes. Here you have a list with news that arrive together with this version, and they are not few. In fact, Torvalds often says something like that the numbering change is because he no longer has fingers and toes to count, but, as in 5.0, there are changes that are worth going up to 6.0 for.
What's New in Linux 6.0
- Processors:
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 support and very early support for the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop.
- Improved KPTI Meltdown mitigation code for ARM64.
- 64-bit THP SWAP support for Arm.
- Some big scheduler changes including improved NUMA balance for AMD Zen.
- The AMD Retbleed IBPB mitigation path also needs STIBP and that security fix is ​​part of Linux 6.0-rc1 while it will also be backported to existing stable kernel series.
- New RISC-V extensions are plugged into the main kernel like Zicbom, Zihintpause, and Sstc. RISC-V also has a more useful default kernel configuration to be able to run the likes of Docker and Snaps in defconfig builds.
- LoongArch enables PCI support and other improvements in this Loongson CPU architecture work from China.
- Raptor Lake support in the Intel TCC cooling controller.
- EFI and ACPI PRM mirrored memory for 64-bit Arm.
- Automatic AMD Mode Transition (AMT) for Lenovo ThinkPad laptops.
- Updates to PowerVM Platform KeyStore and other IBM POWER CPUs.
- Fixed C1 and C1E handling for Xeon Sapphire Rapids.
- Intel Raptor Lake P support within the RAPL driver.
- AMD sleep-to-idle preparations for upcoming AMD hardware.
- Audio driver support for AMD Raphael and Jadeite platforms.
- Intel Meteor Lake audio driver support.
- Removed support for the older NEC VR4100 MIPS processors found in the IBM WorkPad Z50 and other 90s hardware.
- PCI support for the OpenRISC architecture.
- Refinement tool support for AMD Zen 4 Instruction Based Sampling (IBS).
- Intel IPI and AMD x2AVIC virtualizations arrive for KVM.
- Intel SGX2 support has finally been added.
- AMD temperature monitoring for upcoming AMD CPUs.
- AMD's use of MWAIT over HALT is now preferred.
- Graphics:
- Continuation of commissioning work on Intel DG2/Alchemist and ATS-M. More PCI IDs have also been implemented, though early owners of Intel Arc desktop GPUs will still need to use the i915.force_probe option to enable DG2-class hardware support.
- First works towards Intel Ponte Vecchio.
- Work begins on support for Meteor Lake graphics, though more patches for Linux 6.1 are forthcoming.
- More enablement work towards AMD RDNA3 graphics and other new IP blocks.
- P2P DMA for AMDKFD driver along with other AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver enhancements.
- Raspberry Pi V3D kernel driver support for the Raspberry Pi 4.
- Initial Arm Mali Valhall support on the Panfrost controller.
- Fixes in the Atari FBDEV driver.
- Faster console scrolling on old FBDEV controllers.
- Various other open source kernel graphics driver updates.
- Storage and file systems:
- Improvements to F2FS low memory mode and atomic write.
- NFSD courtesy server improvements and increased cache scalability.
- Performance improvements in SMB3 client code around multi-channel management.
- XFS scalability improvements.
- Support for the forwarding protocol v2 for Btrfs and a direct read performance optimization.
- IO_uring userspace block handler support.
- IO_uring performance optimizations and new features, including zero-copy forwarding for the network.
- Other hardware:
- Continuation of preparations around Compute Express Link (CXL).
- First preparations for WiFi 7 support with multi-link operation (MLO). There are also various network optimizations with this new kernel.
- Fixed keyboard breaking issues on various AMD Ryzen 6000 series laptops.
- Fixed touchpad and keyboard issues after sleep on many TUXEDO Computers / Clevo laptops.
- Habana Labs Gaudi2 support for Intel's recently announced AI accelerator.
- Realtek R8188EU WiFi controller big clean.
- Intel Raptor Lake Thunderbolt support.
- AMD SFH v1.1 support for Sensor Fusion Hub with new Ryzen laptops.
- More ASUS motherboards with sensor support in operation.
- Stand for the XP-PEN Deco L drawing tablet.
- Support for the Aquacomputer Quadro fan controller.
- Others:
- The H.265/HEVC Media Userspace API has become stable.
- Support for setting the system hostname via the hostname= kernel option.
- Many improvements in VirtIO.
- The VMEbus code was demoted back to the kernel staging area.
- The Kconfig switch for compiler optimization level "-O3" has been removed from the kernel.
- SPI performance improvements.
- Various improvements to the RNG.
- Runtime verification for security critical systems.
Linux 6.0 has been released in a stable version, so it can now be downloaded from The Linux Kernel Archive. Ubuntu users who want to install it will already have to do it on their own, either manually or with tools like Mainline. If you decide to stick with what Canonical offers, you'll be using Linux 6.3 on Ubuntu 23.04 or so.