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A The stable version of Linux 6.0 has been released, with 15,000 unbuilt commits and a noticeable kernel version number. And while major Linux releases only happen when the previous release’s score numbers start to appear too high – “literally no other reason” – there are a lot of things that stand out in this release besides the timestamp.
Most notably, this patch may prevent nearly two decades of slowdown for AMD chips, based on a workaround for power management in the early 2000s that’s been around for far too long. Intel’s Dave Hansen wrote the patch that made it 6.0, noting a comment on a post by Ars that the problem became a costly waste of time as AMD systems gained more CPU cores. The average desktop user won’t see huge gains, but larger systems running on I/O intensive applications should benefit.
Intel’s new Arc GPUs are supported in discrete laptop form in version 6.0 (although still beta). The Linux Phoronix blog notes that Intel’s ARC GPUs appear to all run on open source upstream drivers, so support for future Intel cards and chips should appear as soon as they hit the market.
Linux 6.0 includes several device drivers: 4th generation Intel Xeon server chips, 13th generation Raptor Lake chips, Meteor Lake chips, AMD RDNA 3 GPUs, Threadripper CPUs, EPYC systems, and audio drivers for a number of newer AMD systems.
A small, quirky addition indicates that more important things are happening within Linux. Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, based on ARM-powered Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, gets early support in version 6.0. ARM support is something Linux founder Linus Torvalds is eager to see — he recently wrote release notes for kernel versions of his M2-powered MacBook Air and believes that more people using Linux on ARM devices leads to more bug reports, more patches, and more excitement.
Among the other changes you can find in Linux 6.0, as compiled by LWN.net (in Part 1 and Part 2 format):
- ACPI and power management improvements for Sapphire Rapids processors
- Support for SMB3 file transfer in Samba, while SMB1 is still deprecated
- More work by RISC-VOpenRISC and LoongArch
- Support for Intel Habana Labs Gaudi2, enabling hardware acceleration for machine learning libraries
- “vCPU Guest Kiosk Detector” can tell the host when a virtual guest is frozen
Rust improvements were not included in version 6.0, but will likely be available in the next version, 6.1. Rust, a memory-safe language sponsored by the Mozilla Project began as something Torvalds took a wait-and-see approach to and is now something it used to be hoping to see in 6.0. “Unless something weird happens, it’s going to be at 6.1,” Torvalds told ZDNet’s Stephen Vaughan Nichols in mid-September. Even just having Rust’s “core infrastructure” in version 6.1 meant a big change in Linux, which has long been dominated by C languages (even extended and modified).
It’s worth noting that in 2022, there are fixes in Linux 6.0 to help Atari’s Falcon computers from the early 1990s (or their emulated descendants) better handle VGA modes, color, and other issues.
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