The notable new NFSD experimental feature in Linux 6.18 is the ability to disable I/O caching. Oracle engineer and NFSD maintainer Chuck Lever explained in today's pull request:
"Mike Snitzer has prototyped a mechanism for disabling I/O
Linux 6.18 NFSD To Help With Scalability From Low-Cost Clouds To High-End Servers
The notable new NFSD experimental feature in Linux 6.18 is the ability to disable I/O caching. Oracle engineer and NFSD maintainer Chuck Lever explained in today's pull request:
Important Patch Series For Nouveau Driver Will Help With NVK Performance
The patch series worked on by Mohamed Ahmed, Mary Guillemard, and Ben Skeggs is for enabling variable page sizes and compression.
Ahmed explained with the Nouveau driver patch series:
"The new VM_BIND interface only supported 4K pages. This was problematic as it leaves performance on the table because GPUs don't have sophisticated TLB
Linux 6.18 Works Around An Intel Xeon 6 PCIe Performance Issue
Today's PCI pull request for Linux 6.18 notes of a Xeon 6 workaround for dealing with a PCIe performance issue:
"- Add a Xeon 6 quirk to disable Extended Tags and
Rust-Written Redox OS Enables Multi-Threading By Default
Following some recent bug fixes in the multi-threading code, Redox OS has enabled multi-threaded support out-of-the-box for x86-based platforms moving forward. This obviously is a big performance win for any modern systems working with this Rust-based OS.
Ubuntu 25.10 Delivering Some Nice Performance Gains For Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake"
Ubuntu 25.10 is looking quite nice in the performance department ahead of its official release later this week. On various systems tested thus far, Ubuntu 25.10 is delivering nice gains over Ubuntu 25.04 and compared to the current Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The latest Ubuntu 25.10 benchmarking at Phoronix is looking at the Intel Core Ultra Lunar Lake performance using the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop.
Linux Preps IAA Accelerator Support For Intel's Wildcat Lake
The Linux support for Intel's Wildcat Lake continues coming together and largely building off the existing driver code paths already in place for
Many Networking Performance Improvements & New Hardware In Linux 6.18
Linux 6.18 networking highlights include:
- Some big improvements for servers encountering DDoS attacks . Particularly for Linux servers suffering from distributed denial of service attacks is much better scalability and better throughput capacity.
- Google PSP encryption for TCP
ALGOL 68 Programming Language Support Still Being Worked On For GCC
The GCC steering committee earlier in the year decided to not merge the ALGOL 68 front-end but were okay with it being developed on a branch
Linux 6.18 Adds Two New x86 Platform Drivers, New AMD PMF Capabilities
The merged x86 platform driver changes for Linux 6.18 include the following highlights:
- The AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver now supports adjusting PPT and PPT APU thresholds. This is part of new AMD PMF capabilities around custom BIOS input handling and the
Intel TDX Will Now Work With Linux's Kexec - Except For Early CPUs With Known Bug
Due to the TDX memory encryption hardware not respecting cache coherency, using Kexec in the presence of TDX could lead to writing back old cache lines on top of data in the kernel kernel. TDX and Kexec were thus an unsupported configuration until now in Linux 6.18 with those limitations being worked around.
Kexec