Kernel 6.15-RC1 Brings Enhancements

Linus Torvalds himself has announced the release of Kernel 6.15 RC1.

The official announcement:

"It's been two weeks, and the merge window is now over.

As expected, this was one of the bigger merge windows, almost certainly just because we had some pent-up development due to the previous releases being impacted by the holiday season.

That said, while it's bigger than normal, it's not some kind of record-breaking thing: we've had bigger releases, although not many. The really big releases tend to be due to some long-running major development being finally merged after many years, and this is not that: this is just the "regular" kind of big.

It's big in both number of commits and in lines changed. The stats look fairly normal, with - once again - another AMD GPU register header file drop adding a ton of lines and standing out. But while that is a big chunk in itself, it doesn't dominate the diff - there's a lot of changes all over.

As always, below is the high-level "this is what I merged" view, which gives a flavor of what's been going on, although it's obviously colored by how certain subsystems send in their development in more digestible and separate chunks, while other subsystems are less granular. So while it gives some idea of what's been going on, you'd need to look at the git tree to drill down into the particulars.

But at a high level it all looks very normal, with two thirds of the patch being driver updates, and the rest being a fairly random mix of the usual architecture updates, filesystems, core kernel (scheduling, timers, MM, networking), and misc infrastructucture (devicetree bindings, more rust infrastructure, zstd update, you name it)."

Some of the changes, include:

• IO_uring now supports zero-copy network receive, improving efficiency for modern network applications.
• The Bcachefs file system has entered a “soft frozen” state for its on-disk format, meaning future format changes will be optional and backward-compatible.
• The in-tree Zstandard (Zstd) compression code has been updated to version 1.5.7, bringing better performance and improved compression features.
• An early version of the NOVA driver has landed, laying the groundwork for a modern open-source NVIDIA kernel driver that uses the GSP firmware for Turing GPUs and newer.
• Support has been added for the AMD Versal NET SoC, extending AMD’s presence in the embedded and networking space.
• The AMD INVLPGB instruction has been merged, enabling a useful optimization for TLB invalidation on newer AMD CPUs.
• AES-CTR crypto performance has been improved for AMD Zen 5 processors and select Intel/AMD CPUs.
• New AMD graphics hardware is now supported through updated driver code.
• A new boot option, hugetlb_alloc_threads, can help speed up kernel boot times by parallelizing huge page allocation.
• The perf subsystem has gained new latency profiling capabilities.
• The kernel now supports block sizes greater than the page size, an important improvement for certain storage configurations.
• New drivers have been added for Apple devices, including the Apple Z2 touchscreen/touchbar and the Touch Bar DRM display driver.
• Preparations are underway for large atomic write support, laying the foundation for improved filesystem atomicity.
• A new fwctl (firmware control) subsystem has been merged, offering a standard framework for managing firmware-related features.