KernelNewbies:

Changes done in each Linux kernel release. Other places to get news about the Linux kernel are LWN kernel status or the Linux Kernel mailing list (there is a web interface in www.lkml.org or lore.kernel.org/lkml). The lore.kernel.org/lkml/ archive is also available via NTTP if you prefer to use a newsreader: use nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.linux-kernel for that. List of changes of older releases can be found at LinuxVersions. If you're going to add something here look first at LinuxChangesRules!

You can discuss the latest Linux kernel changes on the New Linux Kernel Features Forum.

Linux 6.16 changelog.

Summary: This release includes some Ext4 performance improvements; XFS support for large atomic writes; support for USB audio offload; support for zero-copy send TCP payloads from DMABUF memory; various futex improvements; initial support for Intel Trusted Domain Extensions; automatic weighted interleaved memory allocation policy; support for sending coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket, and make easier to build your kernel optimized for your local CPU. As always, there are many other features, new drivers, improvements and fixes. Also, you might be interested in the LWN merge window report: part 1, part 2

1. Prominent features

1.1. XFS support for large atomic writes

This release adds support for large atomic writes. These are writes of multiple FS blocks that will be written atomically - either all the blocks are written, or none.

Recommended LWN article: An update on torn-write protection

1.2. USB audio offload support

After years of work, this release incorporates USB offload support for audio devices. This feature offers major power savings on embedded devices where a USB audio stream can continue to flow while the rest of the system is sleeping, something that devices running on battery power really care about. This is a feature that is available on Android under different implementations, now there is an unified implementation that everbody can use

1.3. Initial support for Intel Trusted Domain Extensions

This release adds initial support for Intel's Trust Domain Extensions, which protect confidential guest VMs from the host and physical attacks. This is done encrypting the memory of the guest VM. This is similar to AMD's SEV-SNP (already supported).

Documentation: Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX)

Intel documentation: Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX)

1.4. Allow to zero-copy send TCP payloads from DMABUF memory

This release adds support for device memory TCP TX path. Device memory TCP (merged in Linux 6.12) provided the ability to zero-copy receive TCP payloads to a DMABUF region of memory while packet headers land separately in normal kernel buffers. The TX path was dropped from the Device Memory TCP patch series to make it easier to review and merge, this release includes it.

Documentation: TX Interface

Recommended LWN article: Direct-to-device networking

1.5. Automatic weighted interleaved memory allocation policy

On modern NUMA systems, memory can be allocated from different nodes, some of which can offer better bandwith characteristics than others. Linux allows to configure different weights to each node so that allocations are done as specified by the administrator, but this configuration is complex and does not address memory hotplug events. Round-robin allocations do not take account of bandwith information either. This release adds an automatic auto-tuning policy. In this mode, all node weights are re-calculated and overwritten whenever new bandwidth data is made available during either boot or hotplug events.

Recommended LWN article: Automatic tuning for weighted interleaving

1.6. Support for Intel Advanced Performance Extensions

This release adds support for Intel APX, or Advanced Performance Extensions. Intel APX doubles the number of general-purpose registers from 16 to 32, allowing code to contain fewer loads and stores, which leads to better performance and power savings.

Documentation: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/advanced-performance-extensions-apx.html

1.7. Add support for sending coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket

This release adds support for sending coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket. This coredump socket allows userspace to not have to rely on usermode helpers for processing coredumps, and provides a safer way to handle them instead of relying on privileged coredumping helpers. This functionality is implemented using another feature that allows to hand out pidfds for reaped peer tasks.

Recommended LWN article: Slowing the flow of core-dump-related CVEs

1.8. Futex improvements

This release adds support for process local hash which is only shared by all threads of process (as opossed by the futex hash that by default is system wide and shared by all tasks). This hash will only be used for a PROCESS_PRIVATE futex operation. There is also support for FUTEX2_NUMA (which feature extends the futex interface to be NUMA-aware) and FUTEX2_MPOL (which feature extends the futex interface to be mempolicy-aware) (cover), commit, [[https://git.kernel.org/linus/55284f70

1.9. Some Ext4 performance improvements

This release incorporates some performance to the "fast commit" path, multi-fsblock atomic write support for bigalloc file systems, and large folio support for regular files. This last can result in really stupendous performance for the right workloads (eg. a 37% improvement on a large sequential I/O workload)

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1.10. Build optimization for the local CPU on x86

For those users who still compile their own kernels, this release adds a CONFIG_X86_NATIVE_CPU option that makes the kernel build with the -march=native option. This makes compilers optimize the compilation for your CPU, which can provide nice performance improvements.

2. Core (various)

3. File systems

4. Memory management

5. Block layer

6. Tracing, perf and BPF

7. Virtualization

8. Cryptography

9. Security

  • kexec: measure events between kexec load and execute (cover), commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit, commit

  • selinux
    • Reduce path walk overhead with a small directory access cache that is added to the per-task SELinux state. This cache allows SELinux to cache the most recently used directory access decisions in order to avoid repeatedly querying the AVC commit

    • Support wildcard match in genfscon. It allows for more expressive and efficient path matching in the policy which is especially helpful for sysfs, and has resulted in a ~15% boot time reduction in Android commit

10. Networking

11. Architectures

12. Drivers

12.1. Graphics

12.2. Power Management

12.3. Storage

12.4. Drivers in the Staging area

12.5. Networking

12.6. Audio

12.7. Tablets, touch screens, keyboards, mouses

12.8. TV tuners, webcams, video capturers

12.9. Universal Serial Bus

12.10. Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)

12.11. Watchdog

12.12. CPU Frequency scaling

12.13. Voltage, current regulators, power capping, power supply

12.14. Real Time Clock (RTC)

12.15. Pin Controllers (pinctrl)

12.16. Multi Media Card (MMC)

12.17. Memory Technology Devices (MTD)

12.18. Industrial I/O (iio)

12.19. Multi Function Devices (MFD)

12.20. Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM)

12.21. Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C + I3C)

12.22. Hardware monitoring (hwmon)

12.23. General Purpose I/O (gpio)

12.24. Leds

  • Support for texas instruments tps6131x flash led driver (cover), commit, commit

  • flash: Add support for flash/strobe duration commit

12.25. DMA engines

12.26. Hardware Random Number Generator (hwrng)

12.27. Cryptography hardware acceleration

12.28. PCI

12.29. Thunderbolt

12.30. Clock

12.31. PHY ("physical layer" framework)

12.32. EDAC (Error Detection And Correction)

12.33. Various

13. List of Pull Requests

14. Other news sites

KernelNewbies: LinuxChanges (last edited 2025-07-27 11:27:10 by diegocalleja)