Linux 6.0 comes with support for new chips, kernel fixes, and quirks.

Linux 6.0 stable has been released with 15,000 non-merge commits and a noticeable kernel version number. And while major releases of Linux only appear when the dotted numbers in the previous issue start to seem too big – “literally there’s no other reason “- this release has a lot of noteworthy things besides the timestamps.

Most notable among these may be a patch that prevents AMD chips from slowing down for nearly two decades, based on a power management workaround in the early 2000s that has been hanging around for far too long. Intel’s Dave Hansen wrote a patch that turned it into 6.0, noting in a comment on the Ars post that the issue became a costly leak as AMD systems increased the number of CPU cores. The average desktop user won’t see huge benefits, but larger systems running I/O intensive applications should win.

Brand new Intel Arc GPUs are supported as discrete laptops in version 6.0 (although they are still experimental). The Phoronix Linux blog notes that all Intel ARC GPUs seem to run on the original open source drivers, so support should come for future Intel cards and chipsets as they hit the market.

Linux 6.0 includes a number of noteworthy hardware drivers: 4th generation Intel Xeon server chips, 13th generation Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake chips that are not quite out yet, AMD RDNA 3 GPUs, Threadripper processors, EPYC systems, and audio drivers for a number of newer AMD systems.

One quirky little addition points to more important things going on inside Linux. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X13s, based on the ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, will receive early support in version 6.0. ARM support is something Linux founder Linus Torvalds really wants to see – he recently wrote the kernel release notes for his M2-powered MacBook Air and believes that the more people use Linux on ARM devices, the more bug reports, more fixes. etc. enthusiasm.

Other changes you can find in Linux 6.0 compiled by LWN.net (in parts one and two):

• ACPI and power management improvements for Rapid Sapphire processors.
• Support for SMB3 file transfer inside Samba, while SMB1 is no longer recommended.
• Additional work on RISC-V, OpenRISC and LoongArch technologies
• Support for Intel Hbana Labs Gaudi2, providing hardware acceleration for machine learning libraries.
• “Guest vCPU stop detector”, which can tell the host when the virtual client is hung.

Version 6.0 does not include Rust improvements, but they will most likely appear in the next version 6.1. Rust, a memory-safe language sponsored by the Mozilla project, started out as something that Torvalds was looking forward to, and now he hoped to see it in version 6.0. “Unless something weird happens, he’ll be in 6.1,”Torvalds told ZDNet’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols in mid-September. Even having a “core infrastructure” for Rust in 6.1 means big changes to Linux, which has long been dominated by C languages ​​(albeit extended and modified).

It should be noted that in 2022 Linux 6.0 has fixes to help early 1990s Atari Falcon computers (or their emulated descendants) better deal with VGA modes, color and other issues.