Two months after the release of the previous Linux kernel, we again have a new release – 6.5. Though two months doesn’t look like a great deal, there are a great number of changes added to the new version. 1467 fixes from about 2000 developers, 78 MB of size, with 1294205 lines of code added and 930515 lines removed. Most modifications affect the driver, lots affect the architecture code, followed by network stack, file systems, and internal kernel subsystems
Hardware and driver updates
- Extended USB4 support.
- Extended ARM-chip support.
- Extended ARM board support.
- New wireless Realtek chips support (RTL8192FU, Realtek RTL8723DS, and Realtek RTL8851BE.
- FreeSync technology support added to AMDGPU.
- Intel Meteor Lake for i915 driver.
Memory and system services
- PIE support for ARM64 systems.
- memcpy/memset support for ARM systems.
- Online mode for processors through the activation of several CPUs.
- Unaccepted Memory protocol support.
- Rust 1.68.2.
- kfcung filtres for BPF.
- Automatic detection and marking of CPU-intensive workloads.
- ACPI support for RISC-V architecture.
- Simultaneous Multi-Threading support for Loongarch.
- Announced the removal of SLAB and its full substitution by SLUB.
- Optimized load balancing by reducing migrations between SMT areas.
​Disk subsystem and files
- Btrfs optimization.
- EXT4 code improvements.
- FMODE_CAN_ODIRECT for XFS.
- F2FS now supports "errors=" mount option.
- New mount API for Overlayfs filesystem.
Network
- Active network scanning for IEEE 802.15.4 devices.
- The system calls sendpage and splice improved.
- SCM_PIDFD message type added.
Virtualization and security​
- Landlock support.
- Stack Protector support.
- secretmem functionality is now activated by default.
