The Linux 6.0 kernel has been released with changes impacting areas such as chip hardware support, timer registers, and XFS file systems. Bigger changes such as Rust programming language support are lined up for Linux 6.1.
Unveiling of the kernel was announced by Linux founder Linus Torvalds in a bulletin on October 2. The bulletin cites various changes including proper enablement of registers before accessing timers as well as ensuring that all MACs are powered down before reset and only doing PLL once after a reset. Other changes, cited by the lwn.net news site for Linux, include buffered writes to XFS file systems and zero-copy network transmission with io_uring.
“So, as is hopefully clear to everybody, the major version number change is more about me running out of fingers and toes than it is about any big fundamental changes,” Torvalds said. “But of course there’s a lot of various changes in 6.0 — we’ve got over 15,000 non-merge commits in there in total, after all, and as such 6.0 is
one of the bigger releases at least in numbers of commits in a while.”
Torvalds was set to open the merge window for Linux 6.1, with a number of “core things” lined up for it. One potential addition to the kernel is accommodation of the Rust language, which could happen next year.
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