Linus Torvalds has announced the first release candidate (RC1) for the upcoming Linux kernel 6.10. This milestone marks the closure of the merge window, during which new features and improvements are integrated into the mainline kernel codebase.
Kernel 6.10 has been assigned the codename "Baby Opossum Posse", succeeding the previous codename "Hurr durr I'ma ninja sloth" that had been used since Linux 4.0.
Table of Contents
Release Overview
In his announcement on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds provided an overview of the changes and contributions included in this release.
While he characterized the release as a "regular-sized" one, potentially even slightly smaller than average, Torvalds noted that the sheer volume of changes means the detailed changelog is too extensive to include in the announcement.
However, he highlighted some key areas of improvement:
- Continued work on XFS online repair capabilities, which now surpasses the changes made to the bcachefs filesystem.
- Numerous driver updates, with a particular focus on GPU drivers, followed by networking, and other areas.
- Updates across various architectures, core code cleanups and fixes, tooling improvements, and documentation enhancements.
Key Features and Improvements
Among the notable new features and enhancements in Linux kernel 6.10 are:
Performance and Hardware Support
- Performance optimizations and improvements for AMD and Intel CPUs.
- Better AMDKFD compute driver support for "small" Ryzen APUs.
- Support for an additional USB-to-parallel port adapter.
- Continued enablement work for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips.
File Systems and Storage
- Expanded XFS online repair functionality.
- Default disabling of the outdated NFS v2 client support.
- Various performance optimizations, including faster opening of unencrypted files and improved AES-XTS disk/file encryption performance on modern Intel/AMD CPUs.
- IO_uring zero-copy performance enhancements.
Miscellaneous Changes
- Steam Deck IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) support.
- Removal of support for legacy DEC Alpha hardware.
Try Linux Kernel 6.10
Users are encouraged to test the latest release candidate by downloading it from the Kernel.org website or the Linus Torvalds's git tree.
Please note that these development versions should not be used on production systems due to their experimental nature.
Linux Kernel 6.10 RC2 is Released with many Bcachefs Patches