All of the ARM64 feature changes intended for the Linux 6.18 merge window have been submitted in advance. There are a few new features worth calling out for 64-bit ARM Linux users.

For enhancing ARM64 Confidential Computing support there is now the ability to accept secrets from firmware and mapping them with appropriate attributes. This accepting secrets from firmware is done using the ACPI Confidential Computing Event Log (CCEL) table.

Linux 6.18 ARM64 also now advertises the presence of atomic floating point instructions to user-space, extending Spectre workarounds to cover additional Arm CPU variants, GCS support for the uprobes implementation, and a variety of other fixes.

More details on all of the ARM64 feature changes for Linux 6.18 via this pull request .