Gamingdeputy news on January 8, Linus Torvalds announced Linux Kernel 6.7 Stable version released, introducing several new features and improvements.
According to reports, this version has more than 17,000 non-merge commits and more than 1,000 merge commits, making it one of the largest Linux kernel versions to date. Gamingdeputy summarizes the highlighted new features of Linux Kernel 6.7:
Dropped support for Intel Itanium IA-64 architecture
Bcachefs file system (experimental)
The x86-64 kernel supports optionally enabling or disabling 32-bit emulation.
Intel Meteor Lake graphics support is enabled by default, and support for Intel Xe2 Support for Lunar Lake graphics.
Added support for NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware to the Nouveau open source graphics driver, resulting in better power management performance and including RTX 40 acceleration in Nouveau settings.
USB Type-C driver now supports DP Alt Mode 2.1.
AMD Seamless Boot is now available on more AMD hardware.
F2FS now supports larger page sizes.
Btrfs feature enhancements such as added FSID (temporary file system ID) support (Valve hopes to introduce this feature for Steam OS in Steam Deck)
AppArmor access control can now be applied to io_uring and supports the creation of user namespaces.
KVM adds support for LoongArch virtualization.
KVM on RISC-V adds Smstateen support.
Added Rust bindings for workqueues and upgraded to Rust 1.73 toolchain.
There have been numerous improvements and feature updates to the perf tool.
Removed ancient videobuf layer.
Adjustments have been made to Logitech HID++.
ASUS WMI driver adds support for Screenpad.
The Bcachefs file system is a copy-on-write (COW) file system based on the Linux operating system, designed to compete with the modern features offered by Btrfs and ZFS file systems, while having the speed and performance of EXT4 and XFS file systems.
Compared with existing mainstream file systems (such as ext4 used by Ubuntu), Bcachefs is more attractive in some aspects. It has built-in file system-level checksums and multi-device functions, and is considered more secure than btrfs and has higher performance.
In addition, the performance of the Btrfs file system has been improved, reducing the deletion time of files with multiple extensions by 12% by reducing the retention time of checksum deletion; by improving the efficiency of extension state merging during insertion, key functions The running time was reduced by 5%.
This release also allows Linux to natively handle CXL link protocol errors signaled via PCIe AER by current generation CXL platforms, adds SVA support for AMD IOMMU, adds Amlogic C3 and S4 SoC support for Watchdog, and adds preliminary support for Intel Lunar Lake Support and upgrade Intel Meteor Lake support to stable version.
For AMD users, Linux kernel 6.7 adds support for more upcoming hardware platforms, including GC 11.5, DCN 3.5, VPE 6.1, NBIO 7.11 and DML2, supports AMD platforms with es83xx chips, and AMD ACP 6.3 and 7.0.
Linux kernel 6.7 is now available from kernel.org Users who prefer to compile the kernel from source can download it, others will need to wait for the new kernel version to appear in the stable software repository of the desired GNU/Linux distribution.
It is worth mentioning that Linux kernel 6.7 will only be supported for a few months. Linux kernel 6.8 has begun to be merged and is expected to be released in mid-March 2024.