Linux 6.9 Features Many Great Improvements For Both Intel & AMD

Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.9 kernel should be released as stable on Sunday. It's been a fairly quiet week so Linux 6.9 stable will likely happen as opposed to going through an extra week with a 6.9-rc8 candidate. With this spring 2024 kernel there are many great features and improvements, especially for modern Intel and AMD platforms.

Back in March following the Linux 6.9 merge window I wrote a Linux 6.9 feature overview that you can check out for a reminder of all the great changes to be found in this kernel. For Intel and AMD the changes continue to be quite heavy for recent and upcoming platforms. Some of the great Intel/AMD changes to find with Linux 6.9 include:

- AMD P-State Preferred Core handling for modern Ryzen systems. This is for leveraging ACPI CPPC data between CPU cores for improving task placement on AMD Ryzen systems for cores that can achieve higher frequencies and also helping in hybrid selection between say Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores. This AMD Preferred Core support has been in development since last year.

- Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" tuning that can yield nice performance improvements on Linux 6.9 for those using new Intel laptops.

- Linux 6.9 has also been showing some performance gains on AMD 4th Gen EPYC with Linux 6.9 and Intel Xeon Max gains in some AI workloads on the new kernel.

- Intel FRED was merged for Flexible Return and Event Delivery with future Intel CPUs to overhaul CPU ring transitions.

- The AMD FRU Memory Poison Manager was merged along with other work as part of better supporting the AMD MI300 series.

- Reworked x86 topology code for better handling Intel Core hybrid CPUs.

- Intel Fastboot support is now enabled across all supported graphics generations.

- Support for larger frame-buffer console fonts with modern 4K+ displays.

- AMD has continued upstreaming more RDNA3+ refresh and RDNA4 graphics hardware support into the AMDGPU driver.

- Continued work on the experimental Intel Xe DRM kernel graphics driver that Intel is aiming to get ready in time for Xe2 / Lunar Lake.

Again see the Linux 6.9 feature list for the more comprehensive overview with the items above just being the subset of some of the most prominent AMD/Intel changes. More Linux 6.9 benchmarks are happening and already a lot of excitement is building for Linux 6.10 changes.