Linux kernel 6.9 is here, with many under-the-covers improvements that won't be very visible to users, but which tidy things up, fix bugs, and pave th

Linux 6.9 arrives, plus Torvalds indicates Arm64 will get a bit more love

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2024-05-14 10:00:08

Linux kernel 6.9 is here, with many under-the-covers improvements that won't be very visible to users, but which tidy things up, fix bugs, and pave the way for future changes.

Linus Torvalds' release announcement summarizes what's new, with the man himself commenting that "last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal)". We looked at some of the upcoming changes back in March when the first release candidate came out. There are many more changes than we have room to go into, but here are some of the highlights.

There are tweaks and refinements to various filesystems. Some FUSE filesystems just filter the view they present of an underlying filesystem, and for those, the new FUSE passthrough mechanism will make them faster.

A more general change that's been in development for more than a decade is the new dm-vdo tooling, which has finally been merged. Developer Permabit was working on its storage de-duplication tech a decade ago, which it named Virtual Data Optimizer or VDO for short.