Linux 6.1 Should Be Very Exciting With Rust, AMD PMF, MGLRU & Other Changes Expected

Linux 6.0 is bringing many great features but looking ahead for Linux 6.1 there are even more changes to get excited about for that kernel which will release as stable around the end of 2022.

Linux 6.0 stable will hopefully be released this afternoon unless Linus Torvalds decides to drag out the release by an extra week. Following the release, the Linux 6.1 merge window will open.

Based on my tracking of mailing lists and the many "-next" Git repositories, below is a look at many of the likely features expected for Linux 6.1. There still are chances for some of the items that Torvalds may have reservations or other last minute issues creeping up, but below is a look at currently queued material in "-next" branches intended to be submitted for Linux 6.1. Among the many changes to look forward to with Linux 6.1 include items such as:

- The initial Rust programming language infrastructure with that initial pull request already having been sent out this weekend.

- MGLRU is expected to be merged as a big win for performance especially on systems under memory pressure.

- The ability to disable Spectre-BHB at run-time on Arm systems due to the "great impact" this security mitigation has had particularly on Arm servers.

- Introducing the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver that is akin to Intel's DPTF. For Linux 6.1 is also AMD PMF Cool and Quiet Framework integration.

- Linux will make it easier to spot potentially faulty CPUs by printing the CPU socket/core at the time of segmentation faults happening to see if seg faults are commonly happening on the same CPUs/cores.

- AMD Zen 4 LbrExtV2 support in perf.

- Call depth tracking for less costly Retbleed mitigations is expected to be merged.

- AMDGPU gang submit handling that is needed by RADV for Vulkan mesh shader support.

- More AMD RDNA3 graphics related work.

- More preparations for Intel Meteor Lake graphics although more Intel MTL integrated graphics patches are still pending.

- Intel Meteor Lake Thunderbolt support.

- Improved Intel GPU firmware handling.

- Removing the Radeon DRM driver's legacy and broken DP MST code.

- Auto-detection of Logitech HID++ high res support rather than right now relying on a quirks table / per-device white-listing support for HID++ high resolution scrolling. The driver will also try to enable HID++ usage for all Logitech devices.

- Numerous HID driver changes.

- The PinePhone Keyboard driver is being added for the PINE64 keyboard case.

- The new Control-Flow Integrity implementation making use of Clang KCFI rather than the former Clang CFI implementation.

- Atomic replace for F2FS may be submitted.

- Btrfs async buffered writes support for a significant throughput improvement.

- New racing car and flight controller HID drivers.

- Generic EFI compressed boot support.

- Intel Habana Labs AI driver updates.

- Aquacomputer High Flow Next support for that German water cooling pump.

- Expanded controller support in the XPad driver along with getting working paddles on the Xbox One Elite controllers.

- The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel default configuration will now warn at boot of W+X mappings.

- Support for USB4 end-to-end flow control with the Thunderbolt networking support.

- Removing the short-lived ASUS EC Sensors driver.

- More ASUS ROG laptop improvements for Linux.

Stay tuned for my coverage of the pulls during the Linux 6.1 merge window followed by getting started with my Linux 6.1 kernel benchmarking at Phoronix.