Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.3 after two months of development. The new release includes notable changes such as cleaning outdated ARM platforms and graphic drivers, integration of support for the Rust language and Hwnoise utility, and support for the Red-Black tree-like structures in BPF. It also includes the BIG TCP mode for IPV4, the possibility of banning the MMFD, and support for creating HID dioders.
The new version includes 15,637 corrections from 2,055 developers. The patch size is 76 MB, and the changes touched 14,296 files. A comparison with the last version shows that 16,843 corrections were proposed from 2,178 developers, and the patch size was 62 MB. About 39% of all changes presented in the nucleus are associated with devices drivers, while about 15% of the changes are related to updating the code specific to hardware architectures associated with a network stack. Additionally, 5% of the changes are related to file systems and 3% with the internal nucleus subsystems.
The main innovations in the nucleus 6.3 include memory and system services. One significant change is the purge of old and not used ARM payments, which allowed for reducing the size of the initial texts of the nucleus by 150,000 lines. More than 40 old ARM platforms are removed. Additionally, the new version includes the possibility of creating drivers for input devices with the HID interface in the form of BPF programs.
The new version also includes continued transfer from the rust-phor-linux branch and additional functionality associated with the use of Rust as a second language for the development of drivers and nucleus modules. RUST support is not active by default and does not bring Rust to include RUST among mandatory assembly dependencies to the nucleus. Instead, the functionality proposed in past issues is expanded by support for ARC types, ScopeGuard, and ForeignNableble. The state of RUST support in the nucleus is close to taking the first modules written on Rust.
Moreover, the new version includes support for the code written in the Rust language in User-Mode Linux on X86-64 systems. There is also added support for the USR-Mode Linux assembly using Clang with the inclusion of optimization at the binding stage (LTO). Lastly, the new command line of the nucleus “CGROUP.MEMERY=NOBPF” is added, which disables memory consumption for BPF programs and can be useful for systems with isolated containers.
The release of Linux 6.3 is significant for developers, especially those working with Rust and HID devices. This new version is expected to enhance system services and improve the development environment for low-level programming