After two months of development, Linus Torvalds presented the release of the nucleus Linux 6.16. Among the most noticeable changes in this release include the driver to accelerate OpenVPN, the Kexec Handover mechanism, inclusion of five-level memory pages for X86 by default, removal of the DCCP protocol, the ZLOOP block, the ability to send Core Dumps via Unix Socket, support for atomic recording in XFS, offload-processing sound for USB devices, optimization in EXT4, virtual driver TPM (Trusted Platform Module), full-fledged implementation of Device Memory TCP, support for unexplored channels in IO_URING, preparation for the DRM drivers of ASAHI, “Usermode Queue” mechanism in the AMDGPU driver, support for TRUSTED DOMAIN Extensions, and Intel Ape (Advance Performance Extensions).
The patch size for version 6.16 is 50 MB, with changes affecting 13793 files, including 655451 lines of code added and 316441 lines removed. In the previous release, there were 15945 corrections from 2154 developers, with a patch size of 59 MB.
About 45% of all changes in version 6.16 are related to device drivers, while approximately 16% are focused on updating code specific to hardware architectures. Additionally, 13% are related to the network stack, 4% to file systems, and 3% to internal nucleus subsystems.
Main innovations in Linux 6.16 include:
- disk subsystem, input/output, and file systems