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Last Monday (3), Linus Torvalds – the creator of Linux – announced the release of a new kernel version of the open source operating system.
Overall, Linux 6.0 didn’t bring big news. However, it arrives with some punctual and important changes aimed at the hardware area, including support for more modern processors from Intel and AMD.
Supported chips include fourth-generation Xeon server processors, and 13th-generation Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake chips; Ryzen Ice Ripper and EPYC; as well as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.
Benchmark tests should be released in the coming weeks, but the promise is that the new kernel will offer performance improvements, especially in tasks that demand very high performance. However, the website Ars Technica already anticipated that average PC users shouldn’t experience huge increases in performance.
In addition to support for the new chips, the new kernel brings audio drivers for several newer AMD systems, improvements in power management, support for compression of H.265 encoded videos, among others.
On the other hand, Linux 6.0 still owes new Rust codes, but they will probably be available from version 6.1 onwards. Rust is a high-performance compiled language designed for systems programming that is sponsored by the Mozilla project.
Despite the ubiquity and high performance of C languages – having been present in Linux for 31 years – it is expected that Rust code will be included to speed up kernel development and reduce time spent on debugging.
Linux 6.0 is an integral part of operating systems like Debian, Ubuntu or Mint. The new kernel should be made available as developers release new updates for these systems.
