Linux 6.12 Features Are Super Exciting With Real-Time, Sched_ext, Intel Xe2 & Raspberry Pi 5
Linux Storage / File-Systems:
- Bcachefs is working toward removing its "experimental" flag hopefully next year.
- XFS and VFS changes to finally support block sizes larger than the page size. This has been more than one decade in the works and is finally ready with Linux 6.12.
- Idmapped mounts for FUSE and wired up for VirtIO-FS.
- LOCALIO protocol support to help boost performance for NFS where the client and server are on the same system such as with containers.
- F2FS goes through more folio conversions.
- 9p network USB gadget driver to help with embedded device development as an alternative to NFS usage.
- Minor performance optimizations for Btrfs.
- XFS adds new ioctls to exchange the contents of two files.
- The file struct is smaller that may help with some file heavy workloads.
- IO_uring async discard support for enhancing performance with this wonderful kernel innovation.
- EROFS support for file-backed mounts.
Linux Networking:
- The NVIDIA Mellanox driver has added Multi-Path PCI as an exciting feature.
- Device Memory TCP support is merged.
- Various other new wired and wireless networking hardware support. Among the new hardware support is for the RTL8852BT and RTL8852BE-VT, RTL9054 / RTL9068 / RTL9072 / RTL9075 / RTL9068 / RTL9071, Motorcomm yt8821 2.5G Ethernet PHY, RTL8126A Rev B, and others.
- There is also a Rust driver for the QT2025 PHY.
Other Hardware:
- Native PCIe Enclosure Management was merged for managing LED lights and blinking patterns on PCIe storage enclosures.
- Numerous laptop support improvements benefiting laptops from Lenovo, ASUS, Dell, LG, Panasonic, and others.
- Various hardware monitoring improvements with the HWMON drivers like more handheld gaming devices now being supported from AYANEO and OneXPlayer.
- PixArt PS/2 touchpad driver that is found in some laptops.
- An HDMI CEC driver for high-end 4K HDMI splitters/amplifiers.
- More IEEE-1394 Firewire improvements.
- New Wacom drawing tablet driver features.
- Improved ASUS ROG Ally X audio support.
- EDAC address translation for upcoming AMD platforms.
- Legacy Intel sound drivers were removed in favor of the newer AVS code.
- Improved support for the QNAP TS-433 NAS.
Virtualization:
- Better VirtIO Vsock performance.
- KVM virtualization can now advertise AVX10.1 support to guest VMs.
- Microsoft Hyper-V will boot Linux faster when having many CPU cores.
- LoongArch KVM to speed-up ARM/x86 binary translation.
- ARM / RISC-V / LoongArch KVM updates.
Linux Security:
- The Landlock LSM has more controls around Unix sockets.
- vDSO getrandom() for five more CPU architectures.
- Greater build time control over CPU security mitigations.
- The new Integrity Policy Enforcement "IPE" security module.
- The Replay Protected Memory Block "RPMB" subsystem is introduced after being talked about for years.
Other Kernel Changes With Linux 6.12:
- Sched_ext was merged! Sched_ext allows for managing kernel scheduling policies via eBPF programs. Sched_ext has been a long-time in the making and is one of the super great features of Linux 6.12.
- Updated the XZ embedded code.
- A kernel stack usage histogram is added to help developers with optimizations.
- Easier building of Pacman debug kernels for Arch Linux.
- The Rust infrastructure with Linux 6.12 prepares for Rust binder and now supports more sanitizers and CPU mitigations.
Now onto the Linux 6.12 benchmarking.
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