During this weekend, Linus Torvalds gave us a new version of the kernel he develops. On this occasion, what we can now install is Linux 6.10, a new installment with many new hardware features, but whether it is because it is true, because of something related to the placebo or because I am more involved in that world, I think it continues to show that a lot of work is being done to improve the experience of games on Linux.
In the section for the Gaming, Torvalds has included support for several ARM-based handheld consoles, support for the Machenike G5 Pro game controller, and has merged the NTSYNC driver to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives. More important than that seems to me the fact that they have included support for Steam Deck IMU for the motion sensors of the Steam deck, plus support for the ASUS ROG Ally HID.
Other news in Linux 6.10
In the graphics and screens section, we find new features such as the Panthor DRM driver is merged to support the new Arm Mali GPUs that require the firmware-based Command Stream Frontend (CSF), Intel's adaptive sync SDP, greater support for Intel Lunar Lake graphics/displays, compatibility of the HDMI sound with Intel Battlemage graphics cards or an Intel low latency track to improve the performance of computing workloads.
Regarding support for new 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, and support for RISC-V has been added. V Milk-V Mars and various additions for ARM platforms.
Among the rest of the changes, several general improvements in the kernel, among which several improvements in VirtIO can be highlighted, Linux will print the number of memory slots occupied when booting, several scheduler updates, better handling for when things "get serious bad" 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, removal of sysctl sentinel bloat from the kernel, upgrade to the Rust 1.78 toolchain, and other additions to the Rust kernel for Linux and continued improvements to the SLUB allocator.
Security enhancements
On the security side, 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 BSD security settings The Linux kernel is expanded to include enabling Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) and other protections and TPM bus encryption and integrity protection to prevent attacks on the Trusted Platform Module.
The new kernel version is available at kernel.org. In most Linux distributions, to install the new version you must download the tarball from there and perform the manual installation. Then there are distributions that already offer it in their official repositories, as is the case of Linux Lite, which has reported on social network X a few moments ago. In the next few hours it will also appear in other distributions, among which several Arch-based ones stand out.
From here, we We recommend staying on the version offered by the distribution unless we notice a really serious failure. Even in those where it is possible to have more than one kernel, it is recommended to install the newest one and have at least the latest LTS installed to be able to boot into a kernel with more patches in case you experience gross failures.
The next version will be Linux 6.11 that will arrive in September.