Based on my monitoring of the various "-next" branches, here is a look ahead at a lot of what is on the table for Linux 6.7: barring any last minute changes or objections being raised by Linus Torvalds to any of the pull requests. Plus there is a lot more that I haven't yet written about so stay tuned for a very active two week merge window... Already in advance of Linux 6.6 being released a number of Linux 6.7 pull requests have been submitted early.
- One of the most significant hardware changes is Intel Meteor Lake graphics now considered stable . Meteor Lake CPUs will begin shipping in December so Intel is now enabling the support out-of-the-box rather than hidden behind the "i915.force_probe" option.
- Itanium IA-64 support is expected to be removed .
- It will be easier to boot-time disable support for x86 32-bit user-space programs .
- Intel's Habana Labs accelerator driver has finished adapting to the accel subsystem .
- Intel DG2-G12 stepping support .
- The incomplete Ponte Vecchio support is being removed from i915 with Intel focusing their PVC support code in the Xe kernel driver.
- Updated Intel IBRS mitigation handling to help slightly with performance.
- Intel La Jolla Cove Adapter (LJCA) adapter drivers.
- AMD has been busy enabling new GPU support and GFX11.5 / RDNA3 refresh hardware.
- The AMD Versal EDAC driver is being upstreamed.
- AMD is enabling Seamless Boot functionality on more hardware .
- The Intel HDMI sound driver is preparing for compatibility with the upcoming Xe DRM kernel graphics driver .
- The QLogic QLGE 10Gb Ethernet driver is to be removed from the kernel due to no longer being maintained.
- Rust bindings for workqueues .
- AMD systems will now indicate with /proc/cpuinfo if SVM virtualization is disabled in the BIOS .
- VirtIO VSOCK MSG_ZEROCOPY support for better performance.
- The Btrfs file-system is adding new functionality driven by Valve's Steam Deck .
- More efficient use of Intel QAT Gen4 hardware .
- Bcachefs might finally be upstreamed .
Stay tuned for more Linux 6.7 kernel coverage followed by the benchmarks.