There have not been many surprises in terms of dates. The development of Linux 6.2 It's been pretty quiet for the winter break, and almost from the beginning it was known that there would be XNUMXth RC. Thus, the launch of a stable version that has already arrived was expected for February 19. Given the timing, in all probability it will be the version that Ubuntu 23.04 uses, and later, at some point, it should also arrive as an option to the LTS versions still supported.
Among the latests Moravia's compositions new arrivals that have arrived together with Linux 6.2, the list is extensive (collection by Michael Larabel), but there's nothing quite as flashy as the foundation for getting started with Rust that is they introduced on Linux 6.1. Yes, there is something that is curious to me and it shows that Linus Torvalds is always ahead of the storms: when most of us still have almost nothing with WiFi 6, Linux 6.2 has already begun to prepare the arrival of WiFi 7 in the kernel.
Linux 6.2 Highlights
- Processors and architectures:
- AMD Zen 4 pipeline utilization data is now exposed to perf to help developers/administrators profile and find performance bottlenecks with the new Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors.
- Ampere Altra's SMPro coprocessor has seen several drivers updated for Linux 6.2.
- Fixed broken strcmp() implementation for Motorola 6800 series.
- A scalability enhancement for large IBM Power systems.
- RISC-V support for persistent memory devices.
- The Intel IFS driver has been fixed for this In-Field Scan feature to provide CPU silicon testing capabilities with upcoming Intel CPUs.
- The Intel On Demand driver is out of the box with more features implemented and is now called Intel On Demand instead of "Software Defined Silicon." Intel On Demand/Software Defined Silicon is the controversial feature for the licensed activation of certain CPU features in upcoming Xeon Scalable processors.
- Intel TDX guest attestation support has been merged as the latest work of Trust Domain Extensions (TDX).
- KVM prepares to expose new Intel CPU instructions.
- A power saving setting for Alder Lake N and Raptor Lake P processors.
- Intel SGX Async Exit Notification "AEX Notify" support to help defend against some forms of SGX (Secure Guard Extensions) attacks.
- Various improvements in AArch64, such as support for the dynamic shadow call stack.
- A new check for the split-lock detector due to a previous kernel change around split-lock detection/boosting hurting the performance of some Steam Play games.
- Support for more Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs, as well as the Apple M1 Pro/Ultra/Max has now been brought to the mainstream. With the enablement push from Apple Silicon the new CPUFreq driver has also been merged.
- AmpereOne Mitigation for Spectre-BHB.
- Graphics:
- Initial NVIDIA RTX 30 "Ampere" GPU acceleration within the Nouveau driver but performance is still extremely poor.
- Support of monitoring of energy sensors for DG2/Alchemist graphs through the HWMON interfaces.
- Continued enablement around Meteor Lake graphics support.
- Intel DG2/Alchemist graphics is stable and no longer hides behind a module flag to enable it. This affects current Intel Arc Graphics, Flex Series, and other DG2-based Intel GPUs.
- Various other DRM graphics driver updates.
- FBDEV support for the "nomodeset" option.
- Raspberry Pi 4K @ 60Hz display support.
- Support for Allwinner A100 and D1 displays within the Sun4i DRM driver.
- Linked to the graphics DRM code is the new computing accelerator subsystem/framework “accel”.
- Storage and file systems:
- Performance improvements and increased reliability RAID 5/6 for the Btrfs file system.
- The exFAT file system driver can now handle the creation of files and directories much faster.
- Atomic replacement and a per-block age-based extension cache for F2FS, the Flash-Friendly File System.
- Several new mount options for the Paragon NTFS3 kernel driver, including features to increase robustness/compatibility with NTFS on Windows systems.
- XFS is preparing for online file system repair support which should be available in 2023.
- SquashFS support for IDMAPPED mounts.
- The NFSD code is getting close to abandoning the old NFSv2 support.
- FUSE enhancements for file systems running in user space.
- Finally added a POSIX ACL API for VFS.
- FSCRYPT support for China's SM4 encryption, but the developer does not recommend using this questionable Chinese encryption to encrypt your data.
- Other hardware:
- Preparations continue for WiFi 7, as well as support for 800 Gbps networks. Protection load balancing has also been added.
- The TUN network driver is now much faster.
- Support for Sony's DualShock 4 controller in the new PlayStation controller as an alternative to existing DualShock 4 support in the community-maintained Sony HID controller.
- Added support for the OneXPlayer fan/sensor controller.
- Hardware monitoring support for more ASUS motherboards.
- USB4 wake-on-connect and wake-on-disconnect support can be optionally enabled.
- More enablement work for the Intel Habana Labs Gaudi2 AI accelerator.
- More drivers for touch screens have been added.
- Support for the Google Chrome OS Human Presence Sensor to detect the presence of people in front of Google Chromebooks.
- Additional support for Intel and AMD audio hardware.
- Additional enablement of Compute Express Link (CXL).
- Dell Data Vault WMI driver has been merged.
- Linux security:
- Call Depth Tracking as a less expensive Retbleed mitigation for Intel Skylake/Skylake-derived CPU cores than using IBRS.
- The Landlock security module adds support for file truncation.
- Input area randomization per CPU as another “appetizing target for attackers”.
- Other changes:
- OMMUFD to review IOMMU handling in the kernel.
- Updated implementation of Zstd in the kernel that is faster and much newer than the previous Zstd code in the kernel. In turn, this should help the various users of Zstd compression/decompression in the kernel now that it's more closely following the 1.5.x era code instead of the outdated 1.4 code.
- Support for multiple compression streams with zRAM.
- A major redesign of the MSI subsystem for message signal interrupts.
- Support for compressed debug information with Zstd.
- The kallsyms_lookup_name() function is ~715x faster.
- The SLOB allocator is deprecated.
- Power saving improvements for idle or lightly loaded systems.
- Building the kernel with -funsigned-char as the compiler flag.
- More Rust code has been taken upstream and built on top of the earlier code introduced in Linux 6.1.
Linux 6.2 Coming to Ubuntu 23.04 during the development phase, and later it will make it to the stable version that will arrive in April. Other distributions, such as Rolling Releases, will receive it depending on their philosophy.