Linux 6.10 Features Include TPM Bus Encryption, More AMD Zen 5 & A Prison Letter Merge Request
Now that the Linux 6.10 merge window has wrapped up, here's a look at all of the exciting features/changes coming to this summer 2024 kernel. Linux 6.10 brings a lot as usual for the latest/upcoming Intel and AMD platforms, never-ending work on file-systems, a new memory sealing "mseal" system call, TPM bus encryption, and dozens of other exciting changes and new hardware support.
Among the quick highlights for Linux 6.10 are faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption when running modern Intel/AMD CPUs, TPM bus encryption and integrity, memory sealing system call (mseal), NFSv2 client support disabled by default, support for newer AMD graphics cards on RISC-V platforms, the NTSYNC driver was merged but not yet in usable form for Linux gamers (Wine / Steam Play), RISC-V now supports the Rust programming language within the kernel, more upstreaming around the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, Steam Deck IMU support, and the XFS file-system expanding its online repair capabilities. Linux 6.10 even honors a prison letter "change request" by Hans Reiser prior to the ReiserFS file-system being removed from the kernel.
Continue on for the more thorough list of the Linux 6.10 features/changes.
Graphics / Display:
- The Panthor DRM driver is merged for supporting newer Arm Mali GPUs that require the firmware-based Command Stream Frontend (CSF).
- More Intel Lunar Lake graphics/display enablement.
- HDMI sound support for Intel Battlemage graphics cards.
- An Intel low-latency hint for improving compute workload performance.
- Many other open-source GPU driver improvements.
- Improved AMD ROCm/AMDKFD support for "small" Ryzen APUs.
- Configurable boot image compression for RISC-V so that BZ2 / LZ4 / LZMA / LZO / Zstd can be selected if desired rather than just sticking to Gzip.
- Support for newer AMD GPUs on RISC-V hardware. RISC-V now has kernel-mode FPU support that is needed for AMDGPU's Display Core to work with newer AMD graphics cards having DCN IP.
- DisplayPort/eDP for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite.
Processors:
- NUMA balancing for multi-size trnasparent huge pages (multi-size THPs / mTHPs) yielding some nice performance benefits.
- Intel and AMD P-State driver updates with fixes and other enhancements for CPU frequency scaling on modern Intel and AMD processors.
- 64-bit ARM can now optionally disable 32-bit user-space support.
- ARM64 support for building Flat Image Tree (FIT) images. FITs are the Linux kernel with the needed DeviceTree that are then easily distributed and can be booted by the likes of U-Boot, Coreboot, and LinuxBoot.
- RISC-V now supports Rust code within its Linux kernel build.
- Support for the RISC-V Milk-V Mars and various ARM platform additions.
- Live migration for the Intel QAT driver.
- Intel HFI will quit wasting CPU cycles.
- Perf tool updates for AMD Zen 5 CPUs along with updating the events for newer Intel CPU models.
- More KVM preparations around Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX).
- New hardware support within the Turbostat utility.
- The x86 instruction decoder is now ready for APX and other new Intel x86_64 ISA additions.
- x32 shadow stacks and other x86 changes.
- Dropping support for very old DEC Alpha hardware.
- PowerPC 40x processor support is removed from the mainline kernel.