Linux 6.10-rc1 Kernel Released With Many New Features

The Linux 6.10-rc1 kernel was just released to top off the Linux 6.10 merge window.

Linus Torvalds just announced 6.10-rc1:

“Ok, the merge window is over, and 6.10-rc1 is tagged and pushed out.

This seems to be a regular-sized release, maybe even slightly on the smaller side. All the stats look fairly normal, but “normal” obviously means “much too big to post the shortlog”, so below is – as always – just my “merge log” that gives an overview of who I’ve merged from with just the barest of descriptions.

We don’t have any new filesystems, and the xfs online repair work means that the bcachefs fixes aren’t even the biggest filesystem change any more. But all of that is dwarfed by all the usual driver updates (and, as is tradition, GPU drivers are in a massive lead, with networking a distant second and everything else is relatively small).

But we do have all the usual architecture updates, core cleanups and fixes, tooling and documentation updates.”

Linux 6.10 brings a lot of new AMD and Intel CPU improvements, better AMDKFD compute driver support for “small” Ryzen APUs, disabling NFS v2 client support by default, Steam Deck IMU support, support for another USB to parallel port adapter, more Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite enablement work, more XFS online repair functionality, various performance optimizations, better performance when opening unencrypted files, sound support for Intel Battlemage graphics cards, faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption for modern Intel/AMD CPUs, IO_uring zero-copy performance optimizations, dropping very old DEC Alpha hardware support, and much more. Tomorrow or so I’ll have out my usual Linux 6.10 kernel feature overview that summarizes my many merge window articles over the past two weeks.

Linus 6.10 is also bringing a new codename: Baby Opossum Posse. The “Baby Opossum Posse” codename succeeds the “Hurr durr I’ma ninja sloth” codename that had been in use since Linux 4.0.

Linux 6.10 kernel benchmarks firing up soon at Phoronix.