Linux kernel 6.10 arrives with punched-up hardware support

The latest Linux kernel is here, with relatively few new features but better support for several hardware platforms, including non-Intel kit.

Linus Torvalds announced kernel 6.10 this weekend and as usual it contains so many hundreds of changes that we can't summarize them all - for instance, the Kernel Newbies summary for this release has 636 bullet points.

The release means that the merge window is now open for proposed changes to go into kernel 6.11, which will probably appear around September. That means it is likely to be too late for both Ubuntu and Fedora's second releases of the year, so kernel 6.10 may be what you get around that time.

There are, as always, some fresh software features in the new release, of which maybe the most interesting is a new memory-management API call called mseal(). Modern CPUs allow blocks of memory to be marked as special in various ways - for example, as non-executable. AMD introduced the NX bit over 20 years ago as part of its x86-64 specification, and a couple of years later Intel added it to its implementation. The mseal() call protects these mappings: it makes them immutable for the life of that process. The patch was submitted by Google last year, and it's likely it will first be used by Chrome and Chromium-based browsers - but probably by other things later. The call reproduces settings which already exist in OpenBSD, as well as the XNU kernel used in multiple Apple OSes.

Additionally, there are small improvements to various filesystems, including bcachefs, Btrfs, ext4, XFS, F2FS, EROFS, and OCFS2. There's support for a much wider range of compression algorithms for the kernel boot image.

However, for this release, more changes overall seem to be in the direction of improved hardware support, over a wide range of devices. On Linux's native x86 (increasingly, x86-64) architecture, this includes better support for hardware encryption, which among other things should deliver faster disk encryption. There's also better TPM2 chip support, improved power management and handling of dynamic CPU speeds. Multiple wired and wireless network drivers have been tuned, and there's support for various new models of CPU and GPU.

Arm support has been improved in multiple areas, both for server processors and CPUs and SOCs used in laptops, including for the Arm's Mali family of GPUs. If the Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Lenovo Thinkpad X13s appealed, notably as a Linux machine, then you might be interested in its inexpensive indirect ancestor too, Acer's Acer Aspire 1 A114-61. This machine's hardware is now more or less fully supported. Although it was a 2021 model, you may be able to find a second-hand unit for $NOT_A_LOT if you fancy an Arm64 Linux laptop. The MIPI webcam sensor used in the X13S, as well as several Intel Thinkpad models, is now supported, too.

Other Arm-powered kit with new support includes several gaming handhelds, such as as the Gameforce Chi, and several Anbernic devices. As we have noted previously looking at SteamOS, gaming support is now a factor visibly driving improvements in Linux.

It's not just Arm: there's also improved support for RISC-V hardware, for instance the budget Milk-V Mars SBC. This extends to the still quite new support for Rust in the kernel. The revision of Rust supported in the kernel has been bumped to version 1.78.0. As we noted when Rust support was first added, whereas the kernel is usually built with GCC, Rust is usually compiled with LLVM and that mainly targets x86-64 and Arm. Now, kernel Rust can be used in RISC-V as well.

Saying that non-x86 support is improving, though, brings up another point: support for earlier DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and before) has been dropped. This is sad news: AlphaLinux was the first non-x86 version of the kernel, and The Register sometimes reported on it back in the 20th century, but Compaq gradually killed it off - and despite rumours, no other company ever started making Alpha processors. All the effort was not wasted: some Alpha people and technology ended up at AMD, where the know-how went into AMD's 64-bit x86 chips.

Rolling-release distro users can expect to get kernel 6.10 any day now. If you're keen for the new shiny but run a Debian or Ubuntu family distro, you could try one of several replacement kernel projects such as Liquorix. ®