Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) host side is done, there was some support for some cloud services but now all the calls used by the host with TDX in KVM are implemented. There was some memory encryption possible with Multi-key Total Memory Encryption (MKTME) but we got this to a new level. [6]
OpenVPN DCO Driver were added to the kernel after the 25th revision. Why do we care? 8x the standard userspace openVPN implementation. image in source =>[39]
"X86_NATIVE_CPU" Kconfig build time option enforce "-march=native" with the compiler to optimize for one's cpu. [1]
Additional AES-XTS cipher optimiations for AVX-512 processors. 1-6% [17]
-faster offlining of CPU because of better topology code [24]
New Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) driver added, the hardware id associated to this new driver is linked to current hardware that is missing driver.... even on windows. soo no clue what it is! [4]
"Requested CPU Minimum Frequency" BIOS option is now honored by the AMD P-State driver. Zen 4 and newer AMD EPYC systems have this BIOS option to let the user set an initial lower CPU frequency limit. It can still be overrode at run-time via the "scaling_min_freq" sysfs file.[7]
Zen CPUs since Zen 1 (2017) have the capability to Report the cause of your system Reset/Reboot. This was not implemented anywhere so here we are, it is now! The kernel can read the register containing the information and output to kernel log a "x86/amd: Previous system reset reason ..". [25]
Back in 6.11 that brought new features like vTPM. Now the driver for the guest side of vTPM is merged.[8]
alot of KVM changes this release, lots of code cleanup and fixes:
Support for the "ALLOWED_SEV_FEATURES" Virtual Machine Control Block (VMCB) features that are set for or by a guest VM. ALLOWED_SEV_FEATURES provides the hypervisor with the ability to enforce that SEV-ES/SEV-SNP guests cannot enable features that the hypervisor doesn't want to allow for guests. [5]
The KVM x86 code also adds support for advertising WRMSRNS CPU instruction support to user-space. [5]
Support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), APX will allow better perf for optimized task(compiler). [23]
5-level paging now unconditional (cannot be disabled) [23]
Intel CPUs will now report outdated microcode as a vulnerability. This means that the intel team will be updating a list of latest microcode for their CPU in the kernel. [26]
Intel Overclocking Watchdog Driver Merged and it comes from a Siemens engineer(lol). Uses the output of an integrated chip to report stability issues. [11]
Intel Enabling Platform Temperature Control Interface. Allows the user-space to set max temp from multiple sensors from SOC (System on chip). This makes a lot of sense considering that OEMs can set default values in the bios that are too aggressive, this allows us to edit it.[12]
Speed Select Technology - Turbo Frequency (SST-TF) has a V2 which we know only that is supports more core than the pre-existing 256 core limit per bucket. [44]
LOOK FOR BENCHMARKS With the Intel updates for Linux 6.16 power management is now support for Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) within the Intel P-State driver, for current-generation Lunar Lake and next-gen Panther Lake platforms TLDR heavily prioritizing the efficiency core as they are more power efficient. [7]
QUICK RUNDOWN FOR FUTURE CPUs:
Support for QuickAssist Technology accelerators (QAT) Gen6. it is a cryptography and compression accelerator for the Xeon Diamond Rapids processors(2026). [17]
Turbostat now support Xeon Diamond Rapids (2026) and Bartlett Lake(2025? industrial(non-general consumer)) processors.[18]
Audio support for Intel Wildcat Lake (??2025-2026??) Not much is known about wildcat lake, should be the future very-low power chip. [21]
Support for the Performance Monitor Unit (PMU) found within the next-gen Xeon "Clearwater Forest" (2026) processors. [22]
Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem (support for ECC memory) now supports Intel Alder Lake S (2021) and Raptor Lake S (2022). Late support makes sense as the CPUs were for consumer with support restricted to small part of the cpu made...
Now for the insane part, support for Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" (2024) was just added after rework of RRL register handling. How can it be this late??? [20]
-Support for Intel's Auto Count Reload which allows to sample undesirable events like high branch miss rate at a lower overhead cost. [22]
-Intel SGX Less Likely To Cause Fatal Machine Checks. BIG TLDR, Poison pages could be reclaim when they shouldn't causing core to shutdown or kernel panic (nice!) [13]
-Users can now control C1 demotion (the process whereby a CPU can independently decide to remain in a higher power state when the kernel tries to enter a lower one) with a sysfs knob, and retrieve information on the capacity of different CPUs. [63]
Enables Support For Arm Scalable Matrix Extension "SME". Was disabled due to bugs, it is now enable for the few SOC supporting it. Arm Scalable Matrix Extension provides enhanced capabilities for matrix operations and builds off SVE/SVE2 vector extensions. (Think AI!!)[14]
Lazy PREEMPT is now supported by arm64. [63]
Enables Multi-Core Scheduler Support using the "SCHED_MC" Kconfig (this is a enable default in x86)
Support for mseal()
Support for StackLeak
Support for up to 2048 cores[2]
As discussed last release, MIPS is dead. Still some SOCs from EcoNet (for routers) were added to the kernel. Manufacturer are rotating to Risc-V.[9]
Support for getrandom() in the vDSO was gradually added to all arch. It was benchmark and by using the vDSO, it is 16X faster. [64]
KVM support on RISC-V is no longer experimental. [64]
Support for mseal()
Optimized routines for raid6 syndrome and recovery calculations
Support for SBI FWFT
New hardware support for Sophgo SG2044 SoC, you can thing of it as a big brother of the Sophgo SG2042 SoC thats in the milk-V pioneer but with at least 2x perf gain.[15]
CONFIG_PREEMPT_DYNAMIC released back in 5.12 (2021) is now supported. This allows to choose the preemption mode to either none/voluntary/full. [19]
Nvidia Nouveau DRM support for Blackwell (GPU the size of a motherboard) and Hopper. [27]
Intel more work on their Xe3 integrated graphics (to be launch 2025).
Support for Link-Off Between Frames (LOBF) for i915 and Xe kernel drivers. LOBF allows for the eDP link to be turned off and on during long vblank durations without enabling any of the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) modes. cool for laptops! [30]
Additional Intel Battlemage PCI IDs added for future graphics cards. [34]
AMD'S AMDKFD now supported by Risc-V joining the X86_64, Power 64 and ARM 64. AMD's GPU seem to have good support on Risc-V! [31]
-Initial AMDGPU User Mode Queues Support[32]
-Apple Add Asahi UAPI Header For Apple Silicon Graphics But No Actual Driver Yet [33]
Lightning round (small stuff).
-Support For Graceful Host Removal For eMMC SD Cards [36]
-Block Write Streams For NVMe Flexible Data Placement "FDP" [37]
-IOUring changes DMA-BUF stuff [38]
With 6.12, TCP zero-copy receive to DMA-BUF region on memory was added to the kernel. Now TCP TX (so the capacity to transmit) zero-copy was added to the kernel. [40]
os\2
Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) was removed from the kernel as it is... unused! It was meant to fix the shortcomings of TCP and UDP for use cases with timing constraint (like gaming and Voice over IP (VoIP)) [41]
-Other network changes [43]
-Support for Realtek RTL8127A 10GbE Ethernet Controller [42]
Apple PCIe Controller support for the Apple T6020 is for the M2 Pro SoC, the T6021 is the M2 Max, and T6022 is the M2 Ultra. Brought to you by the Asahi Linux Crew. [50]
-Support for Apple Magic Mouse 2 USB-C [45]
-Laptop improvement [46]
-ByoWave Modular Proteus Controller Kit Support [47]
-Hardware Monitoring For More ASUS Motherboards [48]
-Initial USB Audio Offloading Code [51]
-Media Drivers [52]
-Support For Hardware-Wrapped Encryption Keys [53]
Faster Exit to user-mode. yes returning from a syscall is now faster as optimization show gains in all architecture:
Benchmarked using getpid which is a very cheap syscall to run showing the most the improvement.
riscv 7.09246% improvement,
x86 2.98843% improvement,
loongarch 6.07954% improvement,
s390 11.1328%[55]
You can now Coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket.(unix socket are used between processes) [54]
GCC 8 is now necessary to compile the kernel. _But Maple, you told us last kernel that you needed 8.1 to compile the kernel..._ Yes! this is because the minimal version can change depending on the architecture. The big change in this release is the removal of the pre-GCC8 fix in the kernel meaning it is impossible to compile with it.
We now have reporting of Soft and Hard lockups and RCU stalls (exposed in sysfs). [58]
A ‘softlockup’ is defined as a bug that causes the kernel to loop in kernel mode for more than 20 seconds (doesn't give task a chance to run) [56]
A ‘hardlockup’ is defined as a bug that causes the CPU to loop in kernel mode for more than 10 seconds (doesn't give Interrupts a chance to run) [56]
RCU stall is (TLDR) when the CPU loops in a place it really shouldn't for one of many condition [57]
Keep in mind that theses issues are pretty "Core" issues...
Rust gains more and more abstractions, more work on the DRM and MM front... [61]
-The ancient uselib() system call, which has been deprecated for some time, has now been removed. [63]
-io_uring can now be used to create pipes. [63]
-Visibility for NUMA task [10]
-Support for CXL's RAS [49]
-Sched_ext upgrades [59]
-New Helper For Restricting Symbols To Select Kernel Modules [60]
-More work on Futex2 [62]
Linux 6.16-rc6 <--- had some instability that ended up being fixed
Major source:
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-TDX-Host-KVM-Linux-6.16
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-SEV-vTPM-Linux-6.16-Merged
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Overclocking-Linux-6.16
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Platform-Temp-Control-Int
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/POWER-Dynamic-Preempt-Linux-616
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Performance-Events
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Report-Previous-Reset-Cause
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Old-Microcode-Vulnerable
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Xe-Linux-6.16-Fan-Speeds
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-AMDGPU-User-Queues
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Ashai-UAPI-Header
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenVPN-DCO-In-Net-Next-6.16
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Device-Memory-TCP-TX-Linux-6.16
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Net-Next-Drops-DCCP
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-SST-TF-More-Than-256-Core
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Platform-Drivers-x86
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-USB-Audio-Offload
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-FSCRYPT-Wrapped-Keys
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-616-Faster-Exit-User-Mode
: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/RCU/stallwarn.txt
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Hard-Soft-Lockups
: https://www.phoronix.com/news/FUTEX2-Improvements-Linux-6.16