Linux Kernel News Archives

Merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.16 was the FUTEX2 code to help with Linux gaming needs particularly around Steam Play. There were plans to further extend FUTEX2 and now two years later there's been recent patches working out more enhancements to this interface.

Linus Torvalds just published Linux 6.5-rc3 as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 6.5 kernel.

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra's EEVDF CPU scheduler code to replace the existing Completely Fair Scheduler "CFS" code looks like it will attempt to land with the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window.

There's a lovely new Linux kernel patch series out that's big in working on a major clean-up of the x86 APIC code (or "decrapification" as it's called in the patches) and also bringing up for discussion the idea of killing off x86 32-bit support. It's unlikely the x86 32-bit support will be removed right now, which is "just museum pieces", but as an alternative would be making it SMP-only to at least remove the uni-processor code paths.

The newest weekly test version of the Linux 6.5 kernel is now available for evaluation and looking out for any bugs/regressions.

Ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc2 release tomorrow there was a set of x86/x86_64 kernel changes merged overnight to deal with some weaknesses in the kernel's Control Flow Integrity (kCFI) / FineIBT (Indirect Branch Tracking) code.

While less than one week has passed since the Linux 6.5 merge window ended and 6.5-rc1 being issued, there is already the first set of drm-misc-next changes submitted to DRM-Next of early open-source graphics/display driver changes geared for Linux 6.6 later this year.

Google engineers have published early code around "Device Memory TCP" (a.k.a. Devmem TCP) as a proposal for transferring data to/from device memory efficiently by avoiding the need to copy the data to a host memory buffer.

Linus Torvalds just declared the first release candidate of Linux 6.5 that also marks the end of new feature code being introduced for this cycle.

Last week all of the x86 platform driver feature updates were merged for the Linux 6.5 merge window which is wrapping up tomorrow.

A new system call found in Linux 6.5 is "cachestat" that allows user-space to query page cache statistics for a file in order to make more informed decisions.

Here comes a very exciting addition to the Linux 6.5 kernel: the initial infrastructure has landed for scope-based resource management.

Tejun Heo last week submitted the workqueue changes for the Linux 6.5 kernel and they include an interesting addition.

The IBM PowerPC feature updates were merged on Friday to the Linux 6.5 kernel.

Currently most avionics real-time operating systems for airplanes are proprietary and very specialized for safety assurance reasons. Using Linux though and other open-source software would ease development, open more developers to being able to work on said avionics platforms, have much better documentation, and lower other barriers, but there are challenges currently involved.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds doesn't write as much actual kernel code these days as he used to. These days he's often busy overseeing the upstream kernel development community with reviewing code, managing releases, and chiming in on mailing list discussions. Once in a while though he gets down and dirty with some low-level kernel hacking just as he's done now for Linux 6.5 with improving the user-mode stack expansion code.

Following the path of SLOB, Linux's SLAB memory allocator is now officially deprecated beginning with the Linux 6.5 kernel series.

Linaro engineers have been working out support for the latest-generation Qualcomm Adreno 700 series graphics processors found in the newest Snapdragon SoCs. Published on Wednesday were the initial MSM DRM kernel driver patches for bringing up the A700 series open-source graphics support.

DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat has sent out the big batch of feature updates to this collection of open-source graphics/display drivers for Linux 6.5.

Herbert Xu has submitted the crypto subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 6.5 merge window with new hardware support and some crypto API enhancements.

While Intel Xeon server processors have supported sub-NUMA clustering (SNC) for a while, HPE SGI UV servers with SNC enabled haven't worked under Linux... But with Linux 6.5 that is changing.

"Some people relax with a nice drink by the pool, I relax by playing around with inline [Assembly code]," as a nice quote of the day as Linus Torvalds explained after he took on improving upon a performance optimization patch that was proposed for the ongoing Linux 6.5 merge window.

The power management and ACPI feature changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel. As usual, it's most interesting on the Intel and AMD fronts with the power management changes for this kernel that will be released as stable in August.

Processing the vmlinux.o object with objtool has been the most memory intensive step of the Linux kernel build process. Prior patches have already worked to reduce this objtool memory use while compiling the Linux kernel and a big patch series now set for Linux 6.5 is set to sharply reduce the maximum heap use.

The work originating in late 2021 for bringing up secondary CPU cores in parallel at boot-time to help shorten boot/reboot times for large core count servers has finally landed with the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel.

As expected Linux 6.4 is out today as stable as an on-time release following a relatively quiet cycle the past two months.

With Linux 6.4 expected for release today the Linux 6.5 merge window will then open. From my close monitoring of the many "-next" Git development branches along with some early pull requests already submitted, here is a look at some of the features that will likely be found in Linux 6.5 barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds himself.

With it having been another smooth week so far in the upstream kernel world, it's looking like Linus Torvalds is likely to promote Linux 6.4 tomorrow rather than going ahead with an extra release candidate. As such, here's a reminder about what makes Linux 6.4 a great summer-time kernel upgrade.

For those making use of the current Linux 6.3 stable series, Linux 6.3.9 is out today and it's particularly important if you make use of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel graphics driver.

The upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel is poised to add support for Qualcomm's Adreno 690 GPU to the open-source MSM kernel graphics/display driver. The A690 is notably used by the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) platform that in turn is what's found inside the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptop and other hardware.

Patches being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window prepare initial support for DEXCR that is found in recent Power ISA specifications.

Linus Torvalds took time out of his Father's Day to release Linux 6.4-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for this kernel that's likely to be officially released next weekend.

Thomas Gleixner of Linutronix, which was acquired by Intel last year, and his team are working on cleaning up the Linux x86/x86_64 boot process. A set of 17 patches that touch the early Linux kernel initialization code and other tree-wide changes have now been posted for discussion.

While Imagination continues bringing-up their PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa, when it comes to their open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver it for now continues living out-of-tree. On tuesday though marked their third version of the PowerVR kernel driver being published.

Meta engineers have proposed a shared wakequeue "swqueue" feature for the Linux kernel's CFS scheduler that can help with a small throughput performance improvement and slightly better latency, particularly for AMD systems with multiple CCXs.

Linus Torvalds announced the release this afternoon of the Linux 6.4-rc6 kernel. The Linux 6.4 cycle continues going smoothly which means we could see the stable release potentially debut in two weeks.

SUSE engineer Nikolay Borisov sent out a set of patches today for "ia32_disabled" that would allow disabling of support for x86 32-bit processes from running on x86_64 Linux systems. As a first step this would be a boot-time option when "ia32_disabled" is set.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc5 as the latest weekly test candidate for Linux 6.4 and this kernel version is looking to be in good shape for a likely release in late June.

Intel engineer Peter Zijlstra on Wednesday posted the latest patches for the EEVDF scheduler, the Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First approach that is based on a research paper from the late 90's. Ultimately the hope is for EEVDF to replace the existing CFS scheduler code.

Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 6.3.5 today along with the 5.15.114, 5.10.181, 5.4.244, 4.9.284, and 4.4.316 point releases for those long-term (LTS) kernel versions.

Due to Linus Torvalds traveling over this US Memorial Day weekend, he released Linux 6.4-rc4 about twelve hours ahead of schedule.

A fix is on its way to the mainline Linux 6.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernel series to fix x86 topology reporting for Intel Hybrid systems. The topology bug within the kernel becomes more pronounced for Meteor Lake laptops where currently internal Intel test laptops can report the systems having 11 CPU sockets rather than the proper number of cores all contained within one CPU socket.

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.5 cycle kicking off in about one month is a new Linux x86 optimization patch for further tuning csum_partial, the function used within the kernel for calculating 32-bit checksums on blocks of data. Much lower latency and higher throughput can be observed with the newly-optimized csum_partial on the latest Intel/AMD processors.

Following the recent removal of the SLOB allocator, SLAB is the latest on the chopping block. In order to push users to the SLUB allocator as the preferred solution, SLAB is now going through its deprecation and eventual removal process.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.4-rc3 kernel following a rather uneventful week.

A patch is pending via x86/urgent to workaround an issue with Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors that is leaving the kernel developers for the time being to disable Process Context Identifiers (PCID) with these Intel mobile/desktop processors.

There is pending patches for adding support for the LEAKSHIELD device to the Aquacomputer Linux device driver. German PC component manufacturer Aquacomputer has been enjoying support for their various products on Linux and the latest seeing support in this open-source driver is the Aquacomputer Leakshield for reporting any water cooling leaks and other performance metrics around your cooling setup.

Months in the making have been the patches for x86_64 parallel CPU boot support to allow secondary CPU cores to be booted in parallel for shortening Linux kernel boot times. Over time the Linux parallel CPU bring-up patches have gone through many revisions while it looks like this work is now positioned for introduction with the Linux 6.5 kernel later this summer.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc2 as the second weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 6.4 cycle.

With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the SLOB allocator is removed while next the plan is for the deprecation and eventual removal of the SLAB allocator.