Linux 6.12-rc5 Released With Intel LAM Disabled, ASUS Lunar Lake Laptop Performance Fix
With Linux 6.12-rc5 beyond the usual bug fixing there are a few notable fixes to have landed this week. There is adjusting the "Meltdown Lite" mitigation handling for AMD Zen 5 CPUs, fixing ASUS laptop handling for newer laptops like what plagued by Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" performance the past several weeks until the fix was devised this past week, and disabling Intel Linear Address Masking (LAM) over security concerns with that CPU feature that only debuted with recent Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors. But due to the LAM security implementations, the kernel support is being disabled until Linear Address Space Separation (LASS) takes off with future processors.
Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.12-rc5 announcement message:
"So rc4 last week was larger than I was hoping for, but I (optimistically) blamed just fluctuations due to random timing of pull requests since the previous week had been small.
And that does indeed seem to be the case.
Because rc5 looks perfectly normal, and maybe even on the small side of normal. The diffstat looks nice and flat too, with the exception of the removal of the da8xx fbdev driver due to it having been replaced by the tilcdc driver. And I'm sure we're all thinking the same thing: "What lovely descriptive driver names we have".
Some of the biggest changes seem to be some 9p reverts, although we do have all the usual suspects too: gpu and networking drivers, and bcachefs fixes."
Linux 6.12 stable should be out in 3~4 weeks from today depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out.
See the Linux 6.12 feature overview to learn about all of the interesting kernel changes in tow for this kernel version that is expected to be the 2024 LTS kernel release.
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