Linux 6.7 Features Include Bcachefs, Stable Meteor Lake Graphics, NVIDIA GSP & More Next-Gen Hardware
With the Linux 6.7 merge window having closed on Sunday, here's a recap of all the interesting new features to find with this new kernel. Linux 6.7 stable will be out either in the final days of 2023 or more than likely in the early days of next year.
There is a lot to love about Linux 6.7... It's very heavy on new features and in fact the largest kernel merge window ever by size. Among the many highlights to Linux 6.7 are the Bcachefs file-system being mainlined, Intel Meteor Lake graphics are now considered stable, more Intel Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake enablement, continued work enabling next-gen AMD graphics hardware, NVIDIA GSP support in the Nouveau driver, scheduler improvements, optional support for disabling 32-bit x86 program support at boot time, and Intel Itanium support was removed. Below is the lengthy feature list for Linux 6.7 meanwhile my focus is now shifting to benchmarking the new kernel over the coming days and weeks.
Processors:
- Support to enable/disable x86 32-bit programs and syscalls at boot time.
- Arrow Lake nad Lunar Lake support within the Turbostat utility.
- Intel Lunar Lake M support in the LPSS driver.
- Improved x86 CPU microcode loading.
- Optimized TLB flushing and software shadow call stacks for RISC-V.
- MIPS AR7 is removed with that MIPS platform being used by routers and other networking devices from long ago.
- Perf adds support for Zen 4 Unified Memory Controller "UMC" events.
- Intel IFS Gen2 support for In-Field Scan.
- More work on Intel TDX for Trust Domain Extensions.
- Initial support for the AMD-Pensando Elba SoC.
- Initial support for a 64-core RISC-V SoC.
- Intel Itanium IA-64 support was retired and removed from the kernel tree.
- Intel Meteor Lake workload type hints support.
- More preparations for AMD Instinct MI300A APUs.
- The AMD Versal EDAC driver was addedM for that AMD-Xilinx IP.
Graphics Cards / Displays:
- Intel Meteor Lake graphics are now considered stable.
- More work enabling Xe 2 Lunar Lake integrated graphics.
- AMD Seamless Boot now works for more AMD hardware.
- Intel DG2-G12 stepping support.
- Continued enablement on next-generation AMD graphics hardware.
- NVIDIA GSP support in the Nouveau driver for providing initial GeForce RTX 40 acceleration support and improving the support optionally for RTX 20/30 series hardware when making use of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor binaries.
File-Systems / Storage:
- Bcachefs was finally merged as that file-system born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code.
- Bcachefs work was followed up by a second round of improvements to better the performance.
- F2FS in Linux 6.7 supports larger page sizes.
- EROFS no longer considers microLZMA experimental.
- IO_uring FUTEX support for better performance.
- IO_uring mediation for AppArmor.
- Minor stability improvements for JFS.
- MMC is seeing 4~5% better random write performance for systems with Host Software Queue (HSQ) support.
- FSCRYPT will now work with more inline encryption hardware.