The Most Interesting New Features Of Linux 6.0

Barring any last minute reservations today by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.0 stable kernel is expected to be christened before the day is through. Linux 6.0 comes with many notable hardware support additions and other improvements, here is a reminder of all what is great about this imminent kernel release.

Back in mid-August after the Linux 6.0 merge window I wrote my usual Linux 6.0 feature list for those interested. For today's article is a recap of some of the most interesting changes, see that aforelinked article for the complete coverage of v6.0 changes.

- The Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs like the A750 and A770 can run on the Linux 6.0 kernel's i915 DRM kernel driver! But it's still experimental in Linux 6.0 so requires the "force_probe" option to enable. But at least with Linux 6.0 it's now possible using these new Intel desktop discrete graphics cards paired with an updated Mesa stack.

- More AMD RDNA3 enablement, hopefully enough to work with the upcoming Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. We'll see at launch but hopefully all the necessary bits are in place.

- Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen3 support and early support for the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop. This work in mainline is still in early form but at least becoming usable and opening up another Arm Linux laptop option.

- Various scheduler changes including some NUMA balancing enhancements for AMD Zen as well as AMD CPUs now preferring MWAIT over HALT.

- Various Intel Raptor Lake additions like for 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 like with the audio code and elsewhere.

- Audio driver support for the AMD Ryzen 7000 "Raphael" platform.

- IO_uring user-space block driver support, various IO_uring optimizations, and other promising I/O related work like Btrfs Send Protocol v2.

- Initial support for Intel Habana Labs Gaudi 2 accelerators.

- The H.265/HEVC media user-space API is now declared stable.

- Run-time verification for safety critical systems.

- A variety of other hardware support additions as outlined in the main feature overview.

Look for Linux 6.0 stable to hopefully be released in roughly twelve hours from now. In the meantime you can see my complete Linux 6.0 feature overview. More Linux 6.0 benchmarks are coming up soon on Phoronix.