Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 6.7: an overview of the main changes

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18405 fixes and new features of the operating system.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 6.7 after two months of development. Major changes include integration of the Bcachefs file system, discontinuation of support for Itanium, Nouveau's ability to work with GSP-R firmware, support for TLS encryption in NVMe-TCP, the ability to use exceptions in BPF, futex support in io_uring, fq scheduler optimization, support for the TCP-AO extension, and the ability to limit network connections in the Landlock security mechanism. added access control to user namespace and io_uring via AppArmor.

Version 6.7 includes 18,405 edits from 2,066 developers, with a patch size of 72 MB affecting 13,467 files, with 906,147 lines of code added and 341048 lines of code removed. Approximately 45% of the changes are related to device drivers, 14% to architecture-specific code updates, 13% to the network stack, 5% to file systems, and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.

Important new features in the 6.7 kernel:

1. Disk subsystem, I / O, and file systems:
   • Included is the code for the Bcachefs file system, which attempts to achieve XFS-like performance, reliability, and scalability, combined with elements of advanced functionality found in Btrfs and ZFS.
   • Btrfs received a simplified quota mode and a new "stripe tree" data structure. The structure is still used in the RAID0 and RAID1 implementations for zoned block devices. In the future, this structure is planned to be used in a higher-level RAID.
   • Ceph adds support for mapping user IDs.
   • efivarfs introduces the ability to specify the uid and gid when mounting.
   • ioctl calls for reading and changing FS attributes have been added to exFAT. Added processing of zero-size directories.
   • F2FS supports 16K blocks.
   • Autofs has been switched to the new mount API.
   • OverlayFS got new mount options " lowerdir+"and" datadir+". Added support for nested OverlayFS mounting with xattrs.
   • XFS optimizes the CPU load in the real-time block allocation code. The ability to perform read and FICLONE operations simultaneously is provided.
   • EXT2 has been switched to using folios of memory pages.
2. Memory and system services:
   • Support for the ia64 (Intel Itanium) architecture has been discontinued.
   • Added the "ia32_emulation" kernel command line parameter, which allows enabling and disabling support for 32-bit mode emulation in kernels built for the x86-64 architecture at the boot stage.
   • Made changes from the Rust-for-Linux branch related to using Rust as a second language for developing drivers and kernel modules.
   • New settings have been added to the cpuset cgroup controller.
3. Virtualization and security:
   • fscrypt now supports block encryption.
   • Added "dirty" data tracking to iommufd.
   • New access control features have been added to the Landlock mechanism.
   • AppArmor adds the ability to control access to io_uring and user namespaces.
4. Network subsystem:
   • NVMe-TCP adds support for TLS encryption.
   • Optimized the fq scheduler.
   • The optional ability to use microsecond-accurate timestamps (TCP TS) (RFC 7323) has been added to the TCP protocol.
5. Equipment:
   • Nouveau has received support for GSP-RM firmware from NVIDIA RTX 20+.
   • The AMDGPU driver supports GC 11.5, NBIO 7.11, SMU 14, SMU 13.0 OD, DCN 3.5, VPE 6.1, and DML2. Improved support for seamless loading (without flickering when switching video mode).
   • The i915 adds support for Intel Meteor Lake chips and adds an initial implementation of Intel LunarLake (Xe 2).

In addition, the Latin American Free Software Foundation has created a version of the completely free 6.7 - Linux-libre 6.7-gnu kernel, which is stripped of firmware elements and drivers containing proprietary components or code sections that are limited by the manufacturer. Release 6.7 updates the blob cleaning code in various drivers and subsystems, such as amdgpu, nouveau, adreno, mwifiex, mt7988, ath11k, avs, and btqca drivers. Removed the code for cleaning the localtalk and rtl8192u drivers due to their exclusion from the kernel. Removed unnecessary components for cleaning xhci-pci, rtl8xxxu and rtw8822b drivers that were previously added by mistake. Blob names were cleaned in dts files for the Aarch64 architecture. Removed blots in the new mt7925, tps6598x, aw87390 and aw88399 drivers.