Merged already for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel were the many block subsystem and IO_uring changes for enhancing I/O on Linux as we roll toward the H2’2025 Linux distribution releases.
Merged as part of the block changes for the new kernel are dropping the pktcdvd driver. The pktcdvd driver is the packet writing CD-RW / DVD-RW / DVD+RW / DVDRAM driver that was already deprecated in the kernel. The main use of this packet writing CD/DVD driver was for direct mount with UDF of CD-RW drivers. But this driver isn’t used so much these days, the code is unmaintained, and the broken code is causing other problems and thus now removed.
The block pull also includes clean-ups for the MD code, various minor improvements to the NVMe code, support for ublk batchc ommands, faster ublk exit handling, converting NVMe to use the IOVA-based API, increasing the default max transfer size, and other alterations.
Meanwhile the IO_uring merge added some new optimizations, avoiding unnecessary memory copies in uring_cmd usage, support for returning TX timestamps via a new socket command, and support for an IO_uring mock file. IO_uring also saw work to prepare for supporting larger pages in the zero-copy receive code. The IO_uring “mock” file is intended to be able to do better testing in terms of IO_uring request handling as a facility for easily testing that code.
