Linus Torvalds heeft versie 6.18 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. De nieuwe uitgave bevat de gebruikelijke hoeveelheid aan verbeteringen. Meer informatie kan bij 9to5Linux en OMG Ubuntu worden gevonden.
Linux 6.18 ReleasedHighlights of Linux 6.18 include the removal of the Bcachefs file system, support for the Rust Binder driver, a new dm-pcache device-mapper target to enable persistent memory as a cache for slower block devices, and a new
microcode=command-line option to control the microcode loader’s behavior on x86 platforms.Linux kernel 6.18 also extends the support for file handles to kernel namespaces, implements initial ‘block size > page size’ support for the Btrfs file system, adds PTW feature detection on new hardware for LoongArch KVM, and adds support for running the kernel as a guest on FreeBSD’s Bhyve hypervisor.
Other new features include PSP encryption support of TCP connections, support for mixed completion queue event (CQE) sizes in the same ring buffer, support for two Alder Lake-S SOCs, guest support for AMD’s Secure AVIC feature, and support for BPF arenas for the PowerPC architecture.
On top of that, Linux 6.18 improves the swap performance, enhances the scaling for NFS servers, improves the UDP receive performance, adds a new “sheaves” feature to improve the kernel memory allocation performance, and implements support for sparse interrupts to User-mode-Linux (UML).
The EXT4 file system received support for 32-bit reserved user and group IDs, as well as a new ioctl() interface for fetching and setting superblock parameters, the TCP stack received initial support for Accurate Explicit Congestion Notification (AccECN), and the OverlayFS now supports case-folding.
Among other noteworthy changes, Linux kernel 6.18 improves the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to support the virtualizing control-flow enforcement technology (CET) on Intel and AMD systems, adds support for SEV-SNP CipherText Hiding on x86 hosts, and adds support for preserving vmalloc allocations to Kexec HandOver (KHO).
Some security-related features are present as well, such as support for the audit subsystem to handle multiple Linux security modules at the same time, support for signing BPF programs, and the new HMAC-encrypted-transaction support on the TPM bus feature (TPM2_TCG_HMAC) has been disabled by default.
There are also new and updated drivers for better hardware support, including an EDAC driver for the AMD VersalNET memory controller, which reports hw errors from different IP blocks in the fabric using an IPC-type transport, as well as an EDAC driver for ADM Cortex A72 cores for reporting L1 and L2 cache errors.
Moreover, Linux 6.18 adds a new virtio SPI driver that allows SPI devices to access virtual machines, supports DualSense PlayStation controller audio jacks, extends the Human Interface Device (HID) drivers to handle haptic touchpads, and enables support for Apple M2 Pro, M2 Max, and M2 Ultra SoCs.
Since Linux 6.18 is the last kernel release of the year, it could be the next LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel series, supported for at least a couple of years. However, we now need to wait to see if renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman confirms the LTS status for Linux 6.18, so stay tuned!
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