Linus Torvalds just announced the 6.15-rc1 kernel. He commented:
"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)."
In the next few days I'll have up my lengthier Linux 6.15 feature overview but for now some of the key highlights worth mentioning include:
- IO_uring network zero-copy receive support.
- The Bcachefs file-system now considers its on-disk format to be in a "soft frozen" state with future updates to be optional.
- Updating the in-tree Zstd compression code against Zstd 1.5.7 for better performance and other improvements.
- The very early NOVA core driver has landed as the very primitive basis for this modern open-source NVIDIA kernel driver to be built up over time and leveraging the NVIDIA GSP firmware for supporting Turing GPUs and newer.
- Support for the AMD Versal NET SoC.
- AMD INVLPGB has been merged as allowing for a nice optimization with newer AMD processors for broadcast TLB invalidation.
- Faster AES-CTR crypto performance on AMD Zen 5 and other Intel/AMD CPUs too.
- New AMD graphics hardware support.
- The new "hugetlb_alloc_threads" boot option that can help speed-up kernel boot times.
- Perf gains new latency profiling capabilities.
- Necessary kernel changes for supporting block sizes greater than the kernel page size.
- The new Apple Z2 touchscreen/touchbar driver along with the Apple Touch Bar DRM display driver code.
- Preparations for large atomic write support.
- The new FWCTL subsystem was merged.
Stay tuned for the feature overview of the interesting Linux 6.15 changes followed by the start of Linux 6.15 kernel benchmarking on Phoronix. Exciting times ahead!
Linux 6.15-rc1 released
Linux 6.15 stable in turn should debut around the end of May or early June.
