Linux 6.2 Features: Stable Intel Arc Graphics. RTX 30 Support, Intel On Demand + IFS Ready

Storage / File-Systems:

- Performance improvements and better RAID 5/6 reliability for the Btrfs file-system.

- The exFAT file-system driver can now handle creating files and directories much faster.

- Atomic replace and a per-block age-based extent cache for F2FS, the Flash-Friendly File-System.

- Several new mount options for the Paragon NTFS3 kernel driver including features for increasing the robustness/compatibility with NTFS on Windows systems.

- XFS preparing for online file-system repair support that should be upstreamed in 2023.

- SquashFS support for IDMAPPED mounts.

- The NFSD code is moving closer to dropping the ancient NFSv2 support.

- FUSE improvements for file-systems running in user-space.

- A VFS POSIX ACL API has been finally added.

- FSCRYPT support for China's SM4 cipher but the maintainer doesn't recommend actually using this questionable Chinese cipher for encrypting your data.

Other Hardware:

- Continued preparations for WiFi 7 as well as 800 Gbps networking support. Protective Load Balancing has also been added.

- The TUN network driver is now a lot faster.

- Sony DualShock 4 controller support in the newer PlayStation driver as an alternative to the existing DualShock 4 support in the community-maintained Sony HID driver.

- OneXPlayer sensor/fan driver support is added.

- Hardware monitoring support for more ASUS motherboards.

- USB4 wake-on-connect and wake-on-disconnect support can be optionally enabled.

- More enablement work for Intel's Habana Labs Gaudi2 AI accelerator.

- More touchscreen drivers have been mainlined.

- Google Chrome OS Human Presence Sensor support for detecting if humans are present in front of capable Google Chromebooks.

- Additional Intel and AMD sound hardware support.

- Additional Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement.

- The Dell Data Vault WMI driver was merged.

Linux Security:

- Call Depth Tracking as a less costly Retbleed mitigation for Intel Skylake/Skylake-derived CPU cores than using IBRS. I have benchmarks coming this week and retbleed=stuff does help a lot for reducing the Retbleed mitigation costs introduced a few months ago.

- The Landlock security module adds file truncation support.

- Randomizing the per-CPU entry area as another "tasty target for attackers".

Other Kernel Changes:

- IOMMUFD for overhauling the IOMMU handling in the kernel.

- Updated Zstd kernel implementation that is faster and much newer than the prior Zstd code in the kernel. In turn this should help the various users of Zstd compression/decompression in the kernel now that it's following upstream more closely on the 1.5.x era code rather than the aging 1.4 code.

- Support for multiple compression streams with zRAM.

- A major rework to the MSI subsystem for Message Signaled Interrupts.

- Support for Zstd-compressed debug information.

- The kallsyms_lookup_name() function is ~715x faster.

- The SLOB allocator is now deprecated.

- Power-saving improvements for idle or lightly loaded systems.

- Building the kernel with -funsigned-char as a compiler flag.

- More Rust code has been upstreamed and building off the prior code introduced in Linux 6.1. There still is more Rust code to go as well as awaiting any prominent drivers to be transitioned to Rust, but this is another step in Linux 6.2 towards supporting this additional programming language for Linux kernel development.

Stay tuned for Linux 6.2 kernel benchmarks that have already been started up at Phoronix.