After two months of development, Linus Torvalds unveiled the launch of the new kernel version of Linux 5.16 and in which among the most notable changes is the futex_waitv system call to improve the performance of Windows games in Wine, the tracking of errors in the file system through fanotify, the ability to reserve memory for sockets of network, improved handling of overloads with a large volume of write operations, support for multi-drive hard drives, among other things.
The new version received 15415 fixes from 2105 developers, changes affected 12023 files, added 685198 lines of code, removed 263867 lines.
Approximately 44% of all changes introduced in 5.16 are related to device drivers, approximately 16% of changes are related to updating code specific to hardware architectures, 16% are related to the network stack , 4% are related to file systems and 4% are related to internal kernel subsystems.
Main novelties of the Linux Kernel 5.16
In this new version the mechanism notifies additional tools to monitor file system status and track errors. Bug tracking support is implemented currently only for FS Ext4.
Also handling of writing congestion has been improved These occur when the volume of write operations exceeds the capacity of the drive and the system is forced to block the process's write requests until the already transferred requests are completed.
In the new version, the kernel mechanism used to obtain information about the occurrence of an overload and blocking tasks has been completely reworked.
Btrfs implements support for Zoned Namespace technology, which is used in hard drives or NVMe SSDs to divide the storage space into zones that make up groups of blocks or sectors, in which only the sequential addition of data is allowed, while updating the entire group of blocks.
The directory registration mechanism has been redesigned, In which the number of searches and locks in the tree has been reduced to improve efficiency, in addition to adding limited support for using compression when writing incomplete pages, as well as the ability to defragment subpages.
On the file system Ext4, only bug fixes are logged and the more accurate calculation of the inode table lazy initialization parameters. At the block device level, optimizations have been implemented that significantly increase the efficiency of the link operations to the CPU cores.
Mount options have been added to FS F2FS to control fragmentation of files when they are stored (for example, to debug optimizations for working with fragmented storages).
A new system call has been added, futex_waitv, to monitor the status of multiple futexes at once with a single system call. This feature resembles the WaitForMultipleObjects functionality available in Windows, the emulation of which via futex_waitv can be useful for improving the performance of Windows games running on Wine or Proton.
A handler has been added to Task Scheduler that takes into account cache pooling on CPU. In some processors, such as Kunpeng 920 (ARM) and Intel Jacobsville (x86), a certain number of CPU cores, usually 4, can combine L3 or L2 cache.
Have been implemented several new features based on the DAMON subsystem (Data Access Monitor) added in the latest version, which allows to track access to data in RAM, relative to a selected process running in user space.
In addition to this, the implementation of the compression algorithm zstd was updated to version 1.4.10, which made it possible to significantly increase the performance of several kernel subsystems that use compression.
It is also noted that some of the advanced seccomp () thread protection mechanisms against Specter attacks were disabled by default, which were considered redundant and did not significantly increase security, but had a negative impact on performance.
The Hyper-V hypervisor now supports virtual machine isolation mode, which encrypts the contents of memory.
While the hypervisor KVM adds support for RISC-V architecture and the ability to migrate virtual machines within the host environment was implemented using the AMD SEV and SEV-ES extensions, along with an added API for live migration of AMD SEV (Secure Encrypted Virtualization) encrypted guests.
For the PowerPC architecture, the STRICT_KERNEL_RWX mode is enabled by default, which blocks the use of memory pages that are simultaneously available for writing and execution.
Finally on the part of controllers, amdgpu introduces initial support for DP 2.0 (Display Port 2.0) and DisplayPort tunneling via USB4, added display driver support for APU Cyan Skillfish and extended support for APU Yellow Carp.
The controller i915 stabilizes compatibility with Intel Alderlake S chips and implements support for Intel PXP (Protected Xe Path) technology, which enables you to host a hardware-protected graphics session on systems with Intel Xe chips.
In controller nouveau, work has been done to fix bugs and improve the coding style, added support for x86 compatible Vortex CPU (Vortex86MX).
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
As for the updates of this new version, they should be arriving in a matter of hours / days in the official channels of your distribution or you can choose to carry out the compilation on your own by obtaining the source code from the link below.