Linux Kernel News Archives

Barring any last minute problems from coming up, the Linux 6.5 kernel is expected to be released as stable tomorrow, 27 August. Here's a reminder about all of the great changes and new features with this next kernel version, which is especially heavy on exciting additions for Intel and AMD Linux users.

Miguel Ojeda who leads the "Rust for Linux" effort of integrating Rust programming language support into the Linux kernel has already submitted his pull request of planned feature updates for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle.

Googler Rob Clark on Sunday sent out the set of MSM DRM patches prepped for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. The MSM DRM driver is the kernel component for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics that goes along with the Freedreno Gallium3D and TURNIP Vulkan drivers in Mesa for having a nice Qualcomm Linux graphics stack.

Continuing to support x86 32-bit processors with the mainline Linux kernel continues to be a maintenance burden and uncovering ugly bits of code that are seldom touched. The latest work is on fixing up the 32-bit early microcode loading code so that it's more robust and actually correct.

The linux-firmware.git Git repository on the kernel.org Git repository has been the de facto location for collecting all of the microcode/firmware files needed by upstream Linux kernel drivers. The linux-firmware.git repository is the centralized repository for all firmware files, including the GPU/DRM graphics drivers. Now though a dedicated DRM firmware repository is being established as a staging area for new GPU firmware prior to being picked up by linux-firmware.git.

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.5-rc7 test kernel today, a few hours ahead of schedule.

Linux 6.4 or newer paired with the latest cryptsetup development code has landed support for the OPAL specification for self-encrypting drives.

The reverse-engineered Etnaviv DRM driver for providing open-source graphics support for Vivante graphics IP has prepared a new set of improvements for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle.

Imagination Technologies has posted the fifth iteration of their driver patches for supporting PowerVR Rogue graphics with an open-source Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver that will go along with their Mesa PVR Vulkan driver.

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.5-rc6 kernel a few hours early today after capping off a busy week.

Last month when the Linux kernel was mitigated for Zenbleed as a CPU vulnerability affecting AMD Zen 2 processors, it turns out the Steam Deck APU was accidentally left without coverage. An x86/urgent pull request sent out today for the Linux 6.5 kernel and for back-porting to current stable Linux kernel releases will extend the Zenbleed mitigation to protect Steam Deck gamers.

One of the new Linux kernel patch series out of AMD this week is for exposing ACPI PHAT, the Platform Health Assessment Table.

Following the new Linux stable kernels this week to quickly mitigate the Intel Downfall and AMD Inception vulnerabilities, today brings another set of stable point releases. Among the fixes to be picked up since Tuesday is the other AMD fix for the week of a Zen 1 bug that could leak data following a divide by zero operation.

As soon as the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was made public yesterday, the Linux kernel mitigation patches were merged and within hours appeared in six new stable point releases for the kernel along with the Intel Downfall mitigation patches. Today though these patches are seeing a rework to clean-up this mitigation.

As a result of the AMD INCEPTION and Intel DOWNFALL speculative execution vulnerabilities published this Patch Tuesday, Linux 6.5 Git quickly picked up the patches on embargo expiration and now there are six new stable point releases for back-porting these CPU security vulnerabilites to the supported stable kernel series.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.5-rc5 as the newest test candidate aiming for the stable Linux 6.5 kernel around the end of August.

In addition to Loongson preparing Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) for LoongArch to help with MIPS / x86 / Arm binary translation on this domestic Chinese CPU architecture, additional LoongArch features are also now slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle.

SK engineer Byungchul Park noticed costly migration overhead especially with TLB shoot-downs hurting performance while he was working with Compute Express Link (CXL) on Linux. That led to some optimization patches to reduce TLB flushes under some select cases that in turn led to a 50% reduction in full flushes and has the possibility of helping performance.

Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes were sent out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in a few weeks.

The "v1" patches were posted today for a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver to be used for display purposes with the StarFive JH7110, a low-cost RISC-V SoC found in the VisionFive boards, PINE64 Star64, and other low-cost RISC-V single board computers.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds is growing frustrated with AMD fTPM hardware random number generator bugs on recent Ryzen systems plaguing the kernel and has expressed a desire in disabling its use.

Linus Torvalds released the latest weekly test candidate of the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel.

As one of the last blockers for getting real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support mainlined in the Linux kernel, this week saw a revised patch series around non-blocking consoles.

Linux 6.5 upgraded its Rust toolchain against Rust 1.68.2. This was the first upgrade of the Rust toolchain from the original v1.62 requirements when the first Rust kernel code was mainlined. A second upgrade is now planned to take it to Rust 1.71.

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.