Linux Kernel 6.12 was released! Linus Torvalds announced on Sunday:
“No strange surprises this last week, so we’re sticking to the regular release schedule, and that obviously means that the merge window opens
tomorrow. I already have two dozen+ pull requests in my mailbox, kudos to all the early birds.But before the merge window opens, please give this a quick test to make sure we didn’t mess anything up. The shortlog below gives you the summary for the last week, and nothing really jumps out at me. A number of last-minute reverts, and some random fairly small fixes fairly spread out in the tree.”
The new kernel introduced many exciting new features. It finally merged the real-time FREEMPT_RT kernel patch, which converts Linux into a fully preemptible kernel. Though, some Linux Distributions, including Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, already added the patch into their own kernel builds.
Kernel 6.2 adds initial support for Raspberry Pi 5 with Broadcom BCM2712 SoC. It supports for several more Snapdragon X1 laptops, such as Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 with Snapdragon X1, though there are still various limitations.
As well, it adds new Wacom drawing tablet driver with high resolution wheel scrolling, touch rings with relative motions, two touch rings support. And, it can now optionally display a QR code when a Linux Kernel panic occurs.
image from raspi website
For Intel, the new Kernel updated IFS driver with feature to help verify the health of the Xeon 6 CPU cores, added Efficiency Latency Control (ELC) for uncore driver, and, enhanced P/E core exerience on Intel Lunar Lake.
The perf tool has been updated with Last Branch Record (LBR) event logging support, and per-PMU context rescheduling that should significantly improve single-PMU performance.
For Intel GPU, there’s now initial Panther Lake HDMI audio support, Xe2 graphics support out-of-the-box in Lunar Lake and Battlemage, as well as fan speed support for intel graphics card.
image from Intel.com
For AMD, the P-State driver has reworked calculations for AMD boost and MAD Preferred Core detection. Run-Time Average Power Limiting (RAPL) added AMD Family 1Ah “Zen 5” CPU detection.
There are as well bus lock detection support, process isolation framework for AMDGPU, and more precise per-queue reset abilities when encountering hardware issues or buggy.
Other changes in Kernel 6.12 include:
- Add BGRT support for LoongArch.
- Generic CPU vulnerabilities support for LoongArch and RISC-V.
- Permission Overlay Extension support for ARM64.
- Add user access fast validation via address masking capability.
- VFS + XFS finally support block sizes larger than the page size.
- NFS added LOCALIO protocol for fairly extrme performance boost
- NVIDIA Mellanox “mlx5” driver with multi-path PCI support.
- Device Memory TCP support, and more.
New and updated hardware support in Kernel 6.12 include:
- Fan control support for ThinkPad Edge E531
- Sophgo SG2042 external hardware monitoring.
- hardware monitoring on various OneXPlayer gaming handheld devices
- PixArt PS/2 touchpads and clickpads.
- Extron DA HD 4K Plus HDMI Splitter.
- Thinkpad X12 Gen 2 Keyboard
- audio support on ASUS ROG ALLY X
- Progammable buttons support for Pannasonic laptop.
- Operation region support for LG laptop
- Battery charge configuration for Dell laptop.
- Fan profiles support for ASUS Vivobook laptops.
- USB 3 support in the Realtek RTW89 driver for the RTL8822CU/RTL8822BU chipsets
- RTL8852BT / TL8852BE-VT, RTL9054 / RTL9068 / RTL9072 / RTL9075 / RTL9068 / RTL9071, Motorcomm yt8821 2.5G Ethernet PHY, RTL8126A Rev B.
How to Install Kernel 6.12
Ubuntu has a mainline kernel PPA, however broken again!
Besides building from the source tarball, the zabbly repository is the only one, as far as I know, that contains the most recent Kernel packages for Ubuntu. However, it usually has several days delay for the new stable series.
