The Linux 6.16 kernel is expected to be released as stable this coming Sunday, 27 July, barring any last minute issues that cause Linus Torvalds to have reservations over issuing v6.16 stable and to instead do a v6.16-rc8 test release. With Linux 6.16 imminent, here’s a reminder about some of the most interesting features in this next Linux kernel version.
Linux 6.16 has been baking a lot from performance improvements to new hardware support and other features. Here’s a look at a few of the changes I find most interesting with Linux 6.16:
– Performance improvements! There are a variety of nice performance improvements to find with the Linux 6.16 kernel. Among the ones I have tested include some nice Intel Lunar Lake performance improvements with this new kernel and also AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics / Strix Halo improving on Linux 6.16.
– Related to the performance side, Linux 6.16 introduces a new “X86_NATIVE_CPU” build option if wanting to cater your Linux kernel build to the locally installed CPU, to “-march=native” compiler optimizations for your kernel build with ease.
– The Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver has initial NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper GPU support. Though don’t expect too much out of the Nouveau performance with recent NVIDIA GPUs.
– The OpenVPN DCO driver was upstreamed finally for providing better OpenVPN virtual private networking performance. OpenVPN data channel offloading (DCO) to the kernel can deliver some very nice speed-ups.
– Intel TDX host support was finally upstreamed for KVM virtualization as part of Intel’s ongoing work around upstreaming Trust Domain Extensions support as found with recent Xeon processors. Intel also introduced Platform Thermal Control (PTC) interface, initial support for Intel QAT6 Gen6 for their next-generation QuickAssist accelerators, began upstreaming more Wildcat Lake platform code, and other new feature code this cycle.
– One new Intel feature worth calling out on its own is Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) should be ready for use under Linux with the kernel enumeration bits merged.
– A convenient addition for AMD Zen Linux users is now being able to report the reason why your system was reset or rebooted.
– AMDGPU user mode queues is an interesting addition for the AMD kernel graphics driver. The AMDKFD kernel compute driver can now also be built on RISC-V platforms for opening up ROCm compute there.
– Performance work on the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems.
– Continued work on making Rust programming more applicable to Linux kernel drivers with various new abstractions and other additions to the kernel.
– FUTEX2 NUMA-aware support and other enhancements there.
More details on the many enhancements to find with the upcoming kernel release via our Linux 6.16 feature overview.
