Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.7 after a two-month development. The main changes include the integration of the bcachefs file system, termination of Itanium support, ability to operate Nouveau with GSP-R firmware, support for TLS-shifting in NVMe-TCP, the possibility of using exceptions in BPF, support for FUTEX in IO_URING, optimization of the FQ of the planner, support for TCP-AO expansion, and the possibility of limiting network connections in the Landlock protection mechanism. Additionally, Linux 6.7 adds access to User Namespace and Io_uring through Apparmor.
Version 6.7 includes contributions from 20,066 developers, with a patch size of 72MB, affecting 13,467 files, and adding 906,147 lines of code with 341,048 lines removed. Approximately 45% of the changes are associated with device drivers, 14% with code updates for specific architectures, 13% with the network stack, 5% with file systems, and 3% with internal kernel subsystems.
Important innovations in Linux 6.7:
- disk subsystem, input/output, and file systems:
- The bcachefs file system is included, aiming to achieve the performance, reliability, and scaling characteristics of XFS along with the extended functionality elements available in BTRFS and ZFS.
- BTRFS received a simplified quota mode and a new data structure called “Stripe Tree,” which is involved in the implementations of RAID0 and RAID1 for zoned block devices. The structure is also planned to be used in higher-level RAID configurations in the future.
- In Ceph, support for user identifiers has been added.
- For Efivarfs, the possibility of indicating uid and gid during mounting has been implemented.
- In ex