Although it was necessary to XNUMXth RC, there have been no big surprises in the development of Linux 6.7, to say the least. In other years, the stable version did arrive after the usual seven, but it is still normal for people to take a break during the Christmas period and that version requires more time. But week up week down, it is always the turn of the stable, and that is what Linus Torvalds launched today.
Linux 6.7 had the largest melting window in history of the kernel, which means that it comes with many new features. Among them, and as usual, support for new hardware predominates, which does not mean so much that it has been released recently, but also that something is supported in the kernel that was not officially supported before. What you have below is the list of the highlights (via Phoronix).
Linux 6.7 Highlights
- Processors:
- Support for enabling/disabling 86-bit x32 programs and syscalls at boot.
- Support for Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake in the Turbostat utility.
- Support for Intel Lunar Lake M in the LPSS driver.
- Improved x86 CPU microcode loading.
- Optimized TLB flushing and software shadow call stacks for RISC-V.
- MIPS AR7, the MIPS platform used by routers and other network devices for a long time, is eliminated.
- 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.
- Support for Intel Itanium IA-64 has been retired and removed from the kernel tree.
- Support for Intel Meteor Lake workload type suggestions.
- More preparations for AMD Instinct MI300A APUs.
- Added AMD Versal EDACM driver for that AMD-Xilinx IP.
- Recorders:
- Intel Meteor Lake graphics are already considered stable.
- More work enabling Xe 2 Lunar Lake integrated graphics.
- AMD Seamless Boot now works for more AMD hardware.
- Support for Intel DG2-G12.
- Continuous enablement on next-generation AMD graphics hardware.
- NVIDIA GSP support in the Nouveau driver to provide initial support for GeForce RTX 40 acceleration and enhance optional support for RTX 20/30 series hardware by making use of NVIDIA GPU System Processor binaries.
- File systems and storage:
- Bcachefs was eventually merged as that file system born from the Linux kernel block cache code.
- The Bcachefs work was followed by a second round of improvements to improve performance.
- F2FS on Linux 6.7 supports larger page sizes.
- New Btrfs features.
- EROFS no longer considers microLZMA experimental.
- FUTEX IO_uring 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 now works with more online encryption hardware.
- Virtualization:
- AMD IOMMU SVA preparations for shared virtual addressing.
- Added LoongArch virtualization for KVM.
- KVM now allows up to 4096 vCPUs to be supported.
- /proc/cpuinfo will no longer be displayed when AMD SVM is disabled by the system BIOS.
- Other hardware:
- Sensor monitoring support for more desktop hardware.
- New network hardware support and improved performance.
- New Intel and AMD sound hardware support.
- Native handling of CXL handshake errors.
- DisplayPort Alternate Mode 2.1 “DP Alt Mode 2.1” support for the USB Type-C controller.
- The Intel La Jolla Cove Adapter controllers have been upstreamed as part of the Intel Vision Sensing Controller.
- Cleaning the Intel Atom ISP Camera Driver.
- Abandoned QLGE Ethernet and rtl8192u WiFi controllers without maintenance.
- New work with Dell and Lenovo keyboards.
- Support for ASUS Screenpad.
- An ACPI platform driver for Inspur systems.
- Cooler Booster support for MSI laptops.
- General admission:
- MM performance optimizations as well as better handling of UEFI unaccepted memory.
- More FUTEX2 work.
- Improvements in the programmer.
- Continuation of work on printk threaded print as a requirement for mainlined real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support.
- More Rust code has been integrated.
- Security:
- Disabling Intel IBRS when a CPU is offline to help deliver better performance in some cases.
- Additional AMD Inception/SRSO mitigation cleanup.
- A new make hardening.config option for the kernel as sane defaults to build a security-hardened kernel.
- Reducing the role of some insecure and obsolete cryptographic algorithms.
- LandLock access controls now cover networks.
- A multi-vendor solution for confidential IT certification reports.
- Reformulation of PE header generation to reduce the attack area.
Now available. Ubuntu users better wait
Linux 6.7 can now be downloaded, but be careful doing it. From here, although we usually talk to Ubuntu users about Mainline Kernels as a tool to install the versions that come directly from Linus Torvalds and his team, we recommend staying with the version offered by the operating system. Already in 24.04 there will probably be the jump to 6.8.