The widespread availability of Linux 6.0, a significant kernel series with new features, enhanced hardware compatibility, and bug and security updates, was announced by Linus Torvalds.
The Linux kernel 6.0, which has been in development for the past two months, is now available. It adds support for the AArch64 (ARM64) hardware architecture, which enables swapping transparent huge pages without splitting them, as well as support for NVMe in-band authentication, PCI buses in the OpenRISC and LoongArch architectures, async buffered writes when using both XFS and io uring, as well as io uring zero-copy network transmission support.
Additionally, the Linux kernel 6.0 adds support for the RISC-V hardware architecture's "Zicbom" extension for managing devices with non-cache-coherent DMA, a new runtime verification subsystem that enables kernel state monitoring, support for creating new CXL memory regions, support for correctly implementing POSIX access control lists on OverlayFS filesystems, and the implementation of the second generation of the Btrfs "send" protocol that supports sending large data.
New user-space memory management capabilities in the DAMON mechanism, support for limiting the NFSv4 server to 1024 active clients at 1GB RAM, support for the EXT4 file system to fetch and set UUIDs stored in a file system superblock, support for the fsnotify subsystem to better control ignored events, support for sleepable BPF programmes attached to uprobes, support for lock contention tracepoints and BPF for inactivity reports, as well as new reports to the perf.
The Linux kernel 6.0 adds a new pseudo-device called "guest vCPU stall detector" that can serve as a watchdog to alert the host if the VM has stalled. This is excellent news for virtualization. Along with these new features, Linux 6.0 also introduces a new debugfs interface, a new BPF iterator, a new set of BPF kfuncs, new BPF helpers for creating and verifying SYN cookies, and a new user-space block driver based on io during.
Naturally, Linux 6.0 also comes with a tonne of new and updated drivers for greater hardware support. Additionally, it includes a number of bug fixes and optimizations that improve performance in comparison to earlier kernels. Of particular note here are the adjustments made to task placement on large systems, performance enhancements made to the in-kernel TLS implementation, and the addition of the new IORING RECV MULTISHOT flag, which enables multi-shot operation with recv() calls.
In terms of security, the Linux kernel 6.0 adds support for the ARIA encryption algorithm, the SafeSetID security module to control setgroups() changes, and hooks attached to a control group or a single target process to the BPF security module. It also implements the fetching of random-number seeds from the bootloader's setup data for the x86 and m68k kernels.
For individuals who want to create their own kernels, the Linux kernel 6.0 is available for download from Linus Torvald's git repository. For everyone else, you'll have to hold off on installing it until the distro's maintainer updates the kernel to version 6.0.
