Linus Torvalds heeft versie 6.6 van de Linux Kernel vrijgegeven. De kernel is het hart van het besturingssysteem en zit, simpel gezegd, als laag tussen de hardware en de applicaties in. In versie 6.6 treffen we onder meer bescherming tegen stack-overwrite aanvallen op Intel cpu's, kunnen bios-instellingen op computers van HP vanuit Linux worden aangepast en zijn er diverse verbeteringen voor AMD gpu's gemaakt. Meer informatie is bij 9to5Linux te vinden. Hieronder is een overzicht te vinden van de belangrijkste veranderingen uit deze uitgave.
Linux Kernel 6.6 Officially Released, This Is What’s NewHighlights of Linux kernel 6.6 include the long-awaited Shadow Stack hardware security feature to protect your Intel CPUs against stack-overwrite attacks, a new firmware-attributes driver for changing BIOS settings from within Linux on HP devices, a new eventfs subsystem for better memory efficiency of the tracing subsystem, and new IIO and Intel IVSC MEI drivers.
Linux kernel 6.6 also comes with support for changing charger mode, middle fan, and eGPU settings for ASUS devices, support for keyboard backlight control on more Lenovo IdeaPad devices, support for new Mellanox-powered devices, as well as support for new device tree interfaces, support for kernel address-space layout randomization, KASLR support, and support for the BPF prog pack allocator on the RISC-V architecture.
On top of that, Linux kernel 6.6 comes with zoned block device and compression support improvements for the F2FS file system, support for shared mmaps in no-cache mode for the FUSE file system, fixes for netfilter and BPF, numerous fixes for the AMDGPU driver, regression fixes for MIDI 2.0 support, and better Intel RAPL power management.
A just-in-time BPF compiler has been added to the PA-RISC architecture, hotplug SMT support is now available for the PowerPC architecture, the mount API gained a new flag to prevent a mount from sharing in-kernel superblocks with other mounts, support for SEV-SNP and TDX guests are now supported on Hyper-V, and the io_uring subsystem received initial support for network operations.
KASAN, KCOV, KDB, KFENCE, KGDB, and other kernel tools are now supported on the LoongArch architecture, support for zoned-storage devices landed for the ublk user-space block driver, the tmpfs filesystem now supports quota, direct I/O, and extended attributes, support for NFSv4 write delegations arrive for the in-kernel NFS server, and the in-kernel SMB3 file system introduced in Linux kernel 5.15 is now finally considered stable.
There’s also improved hardware support on Linux kernel 6.6 thanks to USB MIDI 2 gadget support, support for the Cirrus Logic CS42L43 audio codec, support for Group Multi-Color (GMC) LEDs, support for the GameSir T4 Kaleid controller, KFENCE, KASAN, KGDB, and KDB support for the LoongArch architecture, and support for NVIDIA T4 GPUs to use Secondary Bus Reset.