Linux 6.5 Features From USB4 v2 To More WiFi 7, Unaccepted Memory, Scope-Based Resource Management

File-Systems / Storage:

- Minor optimizations and fixes to the Paragon NTFS3 driver.

- The new cachestat system call for querying the page cache statistics of a file so user-space can make more informed decisions.

- Minor improvements to the F2FS code as they work on zoned block device support and other features.

- Much faster parallel direct I/O overwrites for the EXT4 file-system.

- Performance improvements for Btrfs.

- XFS support for FS-VERITY is nearing the mainline kernel with more preparations merged.

- XFS large extents are no longer experimental.

- Better NUMA awareness in the NFSD/RDMA server code.

- Provisioning primitives for thinly provisioned storage.

General Hardware:

- A NVIDIA SHIELD controller driver contributed by NVIDIA Corp for their 2017 device. Additional SHIELD accessories may be added to this driver in the future.

- Microsoft Xbox controller rumble support for more of their controllers.

- Intel continues doing a lot of Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement. For Linux 6.5 there is CXL device sanitization, secure erase, and CXL 3.0 performance monitoring.

- Initial support for USB4 v2 and bringing up Intel's Barlow Ridge controller that will support this new USB4 standard.

- More WiFi 7 enablement work for that latest wireless standard.

- Many more motherboards are seeing working sensor coverage with the HWMON drivers. This has been a nice trend recently with seeing expanded Intel and AMD desktop motherboards enjoying working sensor reporting under Linux, including current-generation products. The HWMON pull also gets 2022~2023 Corsair power supplies reading correctly with the corsair-spu driver, Aquacomputer Leakshield support, and other hardware monitoring enhancements.

- PS/2 mouse and keyboard handling improvements.

- The AMD-Xilinx Versal watchdog driver was mainlined for resetting the hardware if problems occur.

- Improvements to the IEEE-1394 Firewire driver for exposing async timestamps support to user-space.

- The kernel will now spend less time waiting on PCIe devices.

- WiFi and Bluetooth for the MIPS Creator CI20 board.

- MIDI 2.0 driver support along with more AMD SoundWire code on the sound subsystem side.

- Sound quirks for the ASUS ROG Ally.

General Linux:

- Linux 6.5's workqueues add automatic CPU-intensive detection and monitoring.

- Scope-based resource management infrastructure so that kernel developers can begin using it moving forward. The scope-based resource management for the kernel is based around the new __cleanup() macro for the Linux kernel that wraps around the GCC and LLVM Clang "cleanup" attribute. The compiler "cleanup" attribute allows for defining a function to be called when a variable goes out-of-scope and the compiler will ensure that memory is properly freed to avoid memory leaks.

- The Linux SLAB allocator is officially deprecated and will be removed in a future kernel version.

- Building a full Linux debug kernel is now optimized from 53GB to 25GB of heap use via objtool enhancements.

- An upgrade to the Rust toolchain and other Rust kernel preparations.

Stay tuned to Phoronix for the next phase: Linux 6.5 kernel hardware testing and benchmarking!