Linux 6.9-rc1 Released With AMD P-State Preferred Core, Larger FB Console Fonts
I'll have my usual Linux kernel feature overview in the days ahead, but long story short there is a lot of great improvements with Linux 6.9. Linux 6.9 is bringing support for larger frame-buffer console fonts for today's 4K displays, AMD P-State Preferred Core support is finally upstreamed, durable file handles for the in-kernel SMB (KSMBD) file server, FUSE passthrough mode is finally upstreamed, continued Intel Xe driver enablement, more Bcachefs file-system work, Snakebyte gamepad support, AMD / Intel laptop support improvements, Intel FRED is merged, more AMD MI300 series enablement work continued improvements to IO_uring, and much more.
Linux 6.9-rc1 can be downloaded now via Git. Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.9-rc1 announcement:
"This merge window looks to be fairly normal. If you look at the diffs, you'd think that the bulk of all the changes are AMD GPU header files again, and you'd not be entirely wrong. About 40% of the whole 6.9rc1 patch is indeed just the auto-generated AMD GPU definitions. I wish this was unusual, but it's a pattern.
Anyway, while that is a lot of the actual changes by pure line numbers, it's all just basically noise and not meaningful in the big picture.
In contrast, what _is_ meaningful is a couple of very core updates. The timer subsystem had a fairly big rewrite, to have per-cpu timer wheels to improve performance of timers, which can be a big deal particularly for networking. The other fairly notable core update is to the workqueue subsystem, where one notable addition is for BH workqueue support. That's notable mainly because it means we finally have a way away from tasklets. The tasklet interface has basically been deprecated for a long while, but we've never really had any good alternatives (with threaded interrupt handlers being one suggested use-case, but not realistic in many cases)."
Stay tuned for more Linux 6.9 coverage on Phoronix as the kernel benchmarks fire up across a variety of hardware. Linux 6.9 stable will be out in about two months.
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