Awesome Changes Coming With Linux 6.9: Lots From Intel/AMD, FUSE Passthrough & More Rust

Depending upon how Linus Torvalds is feeling today, Linux 6.8 could debut today as stable and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.9 merge window... Otherwise it will be punted off by one week. In any event, there's a lot of interesting work queuing for Linux 6.9 as shared in today's preview.

From my monitoring of the various "-next" subsystem branches, below is a preview of some of the changes you can expect to see upstreamed (barring any objections from Torvalds or new technical issues uncovered...) for the forthcoming Linux 6.9 kernel version. Stay tuned for more coverage once the Linux 6.9 merge window is actually underway followed by Linux 6.9 benchmarking.

- AMD is introducing the FRU Memory Poison Manager along with MI300 row retirement support.

- More AMD SEV-SNP upstreaming.

- AMD P-State Preferred Core is finally being mainlined!

- Intel FRED looks to be ready for upstreaming as the Flexible Return and Event Delivery.

- A rework of the x86 topology code.

- LZ4 compression option for hibernation images to yield faster system restore times.

- RISC-V kernels can now build with Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) for better performance.

- AMD FreeSync Video support is being retired now that Linux desktops are natively implementing Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

- More AMD graphics hardware enablement for upcoming devices including RDNA 4 graphics cards.

- Intel Fastboot is being enabled across all hardware.

- Intel Arrow Lake graphics support.

- Continued work on the new Intel Xe graphics driver that was merged upstream in Linux 6.8 as an experimental option.

- The Etnaviv DRM driver for Vivante IP has prepped for PCI device support and Mesa's Teflon NPU user-space.

- FUSE passthrough support for better I/O performance of file-systems implemented in user-space.

- Dropping the old NTFS file-system driver now that Paragon Software's NTFS3 driver that has been in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.15 has proven itself and is more capable with read/write support and other features.

- Improved case-insensitive file/folder handling including the possibility of better performance.

- Upgrading to the Rust 1.76 toolchain and AArch64 support for the Linux Rust kernel code.

- Support for the Samsung Wireless Gamepad, keyboards, and Action Mouse.

- Power profile key support on newer Lenovo ThinkPad laptops.

- ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 AIO cooler driver within the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem for thermal/pump monitoring purposes.

Learn more about Linux 6.9 and the performance benchmarks over the weeks ahead. Linux 6.9 stable will be out around the middle of the calendar year.