The Linux kernel is at the core of all desktop and server Linux distributions, fromUbuntutoFedora, and it also powers countless other operating systems and virtual machines. Linux kernel 6.5 is now available, with some great improvements for newer AMD and Intel processors. You can expect to see it in your favorite Linux distribution soon,
Linux kernel 6.5 enables P-State on some AMD Ryzen processors, which should mean performance and power consumption is balanced across CPU cores. There’s also improved load balancing forIntel’s newer hybrid CPUs— the ones with dedicated Performance Cores and Efficiency Cores, like13th Gen Core processors. Beyond the processor improvements, kernel 6.5 adds initial support forUSB4 Version 2, improvements for RISC-V, and progress on kernel drivers for MIDI 2.0 andWi-Fi 7.
Linus Torvalds announced the release over the weekend, saying in a mailing list, “Nothing particularly odd or scary happened this last week, so there is no excuse to delay the 6.5 release. I still have this nagging feeling that a lot of people are on vacation and that things have been quiet partly due to that. But this release has been going smoothly, so that’s probably just me being paranoid.”
Unfortunately, one interesting feature initially slated for kernel 6.5 has been pushed to a later release: theBcachefs filesystem. It’s a copy-on-write filesystem intended to be more reliable than popular options like ext4, and it can already be used on Linux systems as a separate install. Even if you don’t want to reformat your main drive, Bcachefs could end up as a great choice for external drives and RAID setups, since it has adopted many of the same features as ZFS and BTRFS. It supports multiple devices, replication, erasure coding, compression, encryption, caching and much more.
Linux kernel 6.5 isexpectedto be used in the Ubuntu 23.10 update later this year, and it should appear in rolling-release distributions (like Arch Linux) sometime soon. Now, the work on kernel 6.6 begins — Torvalds said “I already have ~20 pull requests pending and ready to go.”
