Linux 6.2-rc1 Brings Stable Intel Arc Graphics, Call Depth Tracking & Many More Features

Following the two week long Linux 6.2 merge window colliding with Christmas day, Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc1 as capping off the merge window and moving on to the testing and bug fixing phase of this release cycle.

Of the new in-development kernel, Linus Torvalds wrote in the 6.2-rc1 announcement:

6.2 looks like it's a bigger release (certainly bigger than 6.1 was). The summary below is, as usual, just my merge log: we've got about 13.5k commits from ~1800 people in total in this merge window, which is actually not that far off the total size of the whole 6.1 release. But let's hope that despite the size, and despite the likely slow start of the post-merge-window calming down period, we'll have a smooth release.

And in the meantime, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all (replace as appropriate with whatever holiday, if any, you are celebrating).

Due to the slow start around the holidays, the Linux 6.2 cycle may end up seeing an extra week (an additional release candidate) of testing before going stable in about two months from now.

I'll have out my usual feature overview in the next day or two of all the notable changes for Linux 6.2... But for my quick Christmas day recap of the Linux 6.2 features merged:

- The Nouveau driver has initial GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" acceleration support.

- Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist hardware is now deemed stable and enabled by default rather than requiring any experimental flag to enable the support.

- The Intel IFS driver is no longer "broken" for this In-Field Scan CPU silicon testing functionality.

- The Intel On-Demand support is ready for the driver originally named for Software Defined Silicon ahead of upcoming Sapphire Rapids processors.

- Intel TDX guest attestation support.

- Intel SGX Async Exit Notification "AEX Notify" support was merged as a security improvement.

- Call Depth Tracking mitigation for Skylake CPUs is optionally available to lessen the performance impact of IBRS. I have benchmarks of it coming up this week.

- Continued upstreaming around Apple M1/M2 support.

- AMD Zen 4 pipeline utilization data to help in finding performance bottlenecks.

- New NTFS driver options.

- Better RAID 5/6 reliability with Btrfs.

- Faster exFAT file/directory creation performance.

- An updated Zstd implementation.

- A big rework to the MSI subsystem.

- Sony DualShock 4 controller support with the newer PlayStation driver.

Stay tuned for more coverage and testing of Linux 6.2 on Phoronix followed by the initial benchmarks coming up soon. Linux 6.2 stable meanwhile will be out in February.