After two months of development, Linus Torvalds presented the release of the kernel Linux 6.8. The new version introduced several notable changes, including the XE driver for Intel GPUs, block device protection mode with Smontated FS, the DEADLINE I/O scheduler, automatic optimization of identical memory pages, the first driver in the language, and the Listmount and Statmount system calls. Additionally, BPFILTER and SLAB were removed, and the guest_memfd mechanism was added to KVM for profiling data.
The latest release incorporated 15641 patches from 2018 developers, resulting in a patch size of 44 MB with changes to 12212 files. 663864 lines of code were added, while 339094 lines were removed. In comparison, the previous version had 18405 patches from 2066 developers, with a patch size of 72 MB. Approximately 42% of changes in 6.8 were related to device drivers, 15% to hardware architecture-specific code updates, 14% to network components, 6% to file systems, and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.
Main innovations in kernel 6.8 include:
- Enhancements to disk subsystem, I/O, and file systems:
- Added block device direct access blocking mode, preventing Root user modifications to file systems on targeted block devices unless explicitly enabled during assembly. Not applicable to BTRFS yet.
- Introduced Listmount and Statmount system calls for detailed file system information retrieval from user space.
- Ongoing work in XFS for implementing online FSCK capability to verify and rectify file system issues.