Linux 6.1-rc1 Released With Rust Now In The Kernel, MGLRU Added, New Hardware Support

Linus Torvalds just issued the first release candidate of Linux 6.1 and in turn marking the end of the merge window for this feature-packaged kernel release. Linux 6.1 stable in turn should be out in December and will likely serve as this year's Linux LTS kernel release.

Linux 6.1 over the past two weeks landed a ton of exciting features: the initial Rust infrastructure was merged for building up with new Rust drivers and subsystem additions over future kernel cycles, MGLRU merged for offering up significant performance potential especially for memory constrained systems, continued work on new Intel Arc Graphics and AMD RDNA3 graphics support, the Kernel Memory Sanitizer landed, Linux x86_64 will warn by default over W+X mappings, the AMD Platform Management Framework merged, printing the CPU cores where seg faults occur, a feature that would have caught all the memcpy-based buffer overflows of recent years, and much more.

Tomorrow I'll write up my Linux 6.1 feature overview in full based on my close monitoring of all the kernel happenings. There are also the dozens of Linux 6.1 articles I've written in recent weeks on the topic. But in any event tomorrow there will be the concise and organized list as usual on Phoronix.

Linus Torvalds commented in the 6.1-rc1 release announcement:

This isn't actually shaping up to be a particularly large release: we "only" have 11.5k non-merge commits during this merge window, compared to 13.5k last time around. So not exactly tiny, but smaller than the last few releases. At least in number of commits.

That said, we've got a few core things that have been brewing for a long time, most notably the multi-gen LRU VM series, and the initial Rust scaffolding (no actual real Rust code in the kernel yet, but the infrastructure is there).

Onward to start the Linux 6.1 kernel benchmarking and hunting for any new regressions...