Linux Kernel
After two months of development, Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 6.0 kernel, in the announcement, the renumbering is done for aesthetic reasons and is a formal step that alleviates the inconvenience of accumulating a large number of numbers in the series, as Linus joked that the reason for changing the version number is more likely to run out of fingers and toes to count version numbers.
The new version received 16585 fixes from 2129 developers, patch size is 103 MB (changes affected 13939 files, added 1420093 lines of code, removed 318741 lines).
Main novelties of Linux 6.0
In this new version of Linux Kernel 6.0, Btrfs implements the second version of the protocol for the "send" command., which implements support for additional metadata, sending data in larger blocks (greater than 64K), and transferring extents in compressed form. Significantly increased (up to 3 times) the performance of operations direct reading due to the simultaneous reading of up to 256 sectors, it is highlighted that lock conflicts were reduced and metadata validation was accelerated by reducing the metadata reserved for lazy elements.
Another important change related to file systems is that new operations were added EXT4_IOC_GETFSUUID and EXT4_IC_SETFSUUID ioctl to the ext4 file system to retrieve or set the UUID stored in the superblock, plus the F2FS file system offers a low memory mode that optimizes performance on low RAM devices and allows you to reduce memory consumption to performance expense.
In Overlayfs, when mounted on top of a file system with user ID mapping, POSIX-compliant access control lists are supported correctly.
Another novelty that Linux 6.0 presents are the new functions to the DAMON subsystem (Data Access Monitor) that They allow not only to monitor the access of processes to RAM from the user space, but also influence memory management. In particular, a new "LRU_SORT" module is proposed, which allows LRU (Least Recently Used) lists to be reordered to increase the priority of certain memory pages.
Implemented the ability to create new memory regions using the capabilities of the CXL (Compute Express Link) bus, which is used to organize high-speed interaction between the CPU and memory devices. CXL allows to connect and use new regions from memory provided by external memory devices as additional physical address space resources to expand the system's random access memory (DDR) or read-only memory (PMEM).
Fixed system performance issues on AMD Zen processors caused by code added 20 years ago to fix a hardware problem on some chipsets (an additional WAIT instruction was added to slow down the processor so the chipset had time to enter an idle state). The change resulted in performance degradation across workloads which often alternate between idle and busy states. For example, after disabling the bypass maneuver, the average tbench test scores increased from 32191 MB/s to 33805 MB/s.
Optimized task distribution between CPU cores in large systems, which made it possible to increase performance under certain types of load.
A new IORING_RECV_MULTISHOT flag on asynchronous I/O interface io_uring, which allows you to use multi-shot mode with the recv() system call to perform multiple reads from the same network socket at the same time. io_uring also implements support for network transfer without intermediate buffering-
Removed deprecated "efivars" interface in sysfs to access UEFI boot variables (to access EFI data, the efivarfs virtual file system is now widely used).
SRV verification mechanism has been added (Runtime Verification) to verify correct operation in highly reliable systems which guarantee that there are no faults. Validation is done at runtime by attaching handlers to tracepoints that check the actual progress of the execution against a default reference deterministic automaton model that defines the expected behavior of the system. Among the advantages of VR is the ability to provide rigorous verification without a separate implementation of the entire system in the modeling language, as well as a flexible response to unforeseen events.
Also highlighted are integrated kernel components for enclave management based on Intel SGX2 technology (Software Guard eXtensions), which allows applications to execute code in isolated encrypted areas of memory, access to which is limited by the rest of the system.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- In the Nouveau driver, the code has been refactored to support the NVIDIA nv50 GPU display engines.
- The i915 (Intel) driver provides support for Intel Arc (DG2/Alchemist) A750 and A770 discrete graphics cards.
- An initial implementation of support for Intel Ponte Vecchio (Xe-HPC) and Meteor Lake GPUs has been proposed.
- Work continued on support for the Intel Raptor Lake platform.
- Added a new logicvc DRM driver for LogiCVC displays.
- The v3d driver (for Broadcom Video Core GPUs) is now supported on Raspberry Pi 4 boards.
- Added Qualcomm Adreno 619 GPU support to msm driver.
- Added support for ARM Mali Valhall GPUs to the Panfrost driver.
- Added initial support for Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 processors used in Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptops.
- Added audio drivers for AMD Raphael (Ryzen 7000), AMD Jadeite, Intel Meteor Lake, and Mediatek MT8186 platforms.
- Added support for Intel Havana Gaudi 2 machine learning accelerators.
- Added support for ARM SoC Allwinner H616, NXP i.MX93, Sunplus SP7021, Nuvoton NPCM8XX, Marvell Prestera 98DX2530, Google Chameleon v3.
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