Without incident, Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.0 stable. Phoenix, a foreign technology media outlet, has taken stock of the many new features and functions that will be introduced in the new release. This article was written in mid-August during the Linux Kernel 6.0 merge window, and today’s post revisits these new features and integrates the tweaks made by the Linux team since then.
Linux 6.0 kicked off the 6.x series in fine form, bringing a variety of performance improvements, new hardware support, security fixes, and the usual file system tweaks. When announcing the release on the Linux kernel mailing list, Linus Torvalds said, “I hope it’s clear to everyone that the major release number changes are more because I’ve lost count on my fingers than any major fundamental changes”.
Naturally, Linux 6.0 introduced a large number of improvements, totaling more than 15,000 unmerged commits, so 6.0 is one of the larger releases, at least in terms of the number of commits over time,” he continued.
New features were introduced in the Linux 6.0 stable release.
"Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs such as the A750 and A770 can run on the i915 DRM kernel driver for the Linux 6.0 kernel! However, it is still experimental in Linux 6.0, so the "force_probe" option needs to be enabled. But at least in Linux 6.0, it is now possible to use these new Intel desktop discrete graphics cards paired with the updated Mesa stack. ● Enabling support for more AMD RDNA3 graphics cards, hopefully compatible with the upcoming Radeon RX 7000 series cards. These supports will be announced at launch already, but hopefully all the necessary pieces are in place. ● Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen3 support and early support for Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptops. This work is still in early form on the mainline, but is at least available and opens up another Arm Linux laptop option. ● Various scheduler changes, including some NUMA balancing enhancements for AMD Zen, and AMD CPUs now favoring MWAIT over HALT. ● Various refinements to Intel Raptor Lake, such as the TCC cooling driver, Raptor Lake P in the RAPL driver, Raptor Lake USB4/Thunderbolt, and other missing Raptor Lake IDs. there is also some initial Meteor Lake support, such as audio code and elsewhere. ● Audio driver support for AMD Ryzen 7000 "Raphael" platform. ● Support for IO_uring user space block drivers, various IO_uring optimizations, and other promising I/O-related work, such as Btrfs Send Protocol v2. ● Initial support for Intel Habana Labs Gaudi 2 gas pedal. ● H.265/HEVC media user space API is now declared stable. ● Runtime validation of safety-critical systems."
