Linux 6.1 Features Include Initial Rust Code, MGLRU, New AMD CPU Features, More Security

Other Linux Hardware:

- Auto-detecting Logitech HID++ high resolution scrolling support and trying to enable HID++ for all Logitech Bluetooth devices.

- Notable sound support additions with AMD Rembrandt added to the Sound Open Firmware code, new AMD "Pink Sardine" audio co-processor support, and the new Apple MCA SoC driver for sound support on new Apple Silicon devices.

- WiFi Extremely High Throughput (EHT) and Multi-Link Operation (MLO) preparations for WiFi 802.11be and WiFi 7.

- Continued Intel Habana Labs Gaudi2 enablement for that next-gen AI accelerator.

- An input driver for the IBM Operation Panel.

- A PINE64 PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case driver for input on Linux was added.

- Many other Linux laptop improvements.

- Intel Meteor Lake Thunderbolt support.

- USB4 end-to-end flow control support with the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt networking driver.

- Better handling for "cheap clone" Nintendo controllers.

- New media drivers and two existing drivers were promoted out of staging.

- Various hardware monitoring driver additions.

Virtualization:

- Xen now supports grant-based VirtIO for x86_64.

- VirtIO block "secure erase" support as well as vDPA feature provisioning support.

- Faster file sharing between the host and guest VMs for those making use of the 9P protocol thanks to a significant 9P VirtIO optimization.

Linux Security:

- The Kernel Memory Sanitizer was merged as a dynamic memory error detector around uninitialized values within the kernel code. This KMSAN depends upon compiler instrumentation currently found with LLVM Clang.

- Linux 6.1 will warn by default over W+X kernel mappings and in a future kernel release may forbid such mappings from being created in the first place.

- EFI work around confidential compute.

- Hardening Retpolines to ensure an INT3 after every unconditional jump.

- SELinux continues deprecating run-time disabling support.

- Improvements to the RNG and crypto code.

Runtime warnings for cross-field memcpy() that would have caught all memcpy-based buffer overflows in recent years for the kernel.

Other Linux Kernel Changes:

- More code clean-ups ahead of PREEMPT_RT. The real-time / PREEMPT_RT work though isn't mainlined yet and still held up by the printk rework.

- Improvements around the Pressure Stall Information (PSI) handling, including the ability to enable/disable PSI data on a per-cgroup level.

- Generic EFI compressed boot support.

- Removal of the high speed serial / TTY over IEEE-1394 Firewire driver.

- Linux 6.1 finishing clearing out the old a.out code.

- The old DECnet networking code was removed.

- MGLRU was merged for overhauling the Linux kernel's page reclamation code and leading to a better user experience especially for Linux systems with limited RAM capacities. Benchmark results are looking promising and this feature is already patched into Chrome OS and Android devices.

- Maple Tree was mainlined as a new kernel data structure with possible performance benefits.

- Linux 6.1 will print the CPU core where a segmentation fault occurs. If Linux system administrators find seg faults keep happening on the same CPUs / cores it may be a sign of a faulty processor.

- The initial Rust infrastructure has been merged as the initial Rust programming language support. Over future kernel cycles new Rust drivers and other kernel subsystem abstractions will be merged.

Now to begin firing up Linux 6.1 kernel benchmarks...