Linux 6.7 has already been released and these are its news

Recently Linus Torvalds unveiled the release of the new Linux kernel version 6.7, which is presented after two months of development and among the most notable changes is the integration of the Bcachefs file system, the discontinuation of support for the Itanium architecture, the ability of Nouveau to work with GSP-R firmware, support for TLS encryption in NVMe-TCP, the ability to use exceptions in BPF, among other things.

The new version of the Linux kernel 6.7 It is made up of 15291 corrections and approximately 45% of all changes introduced are related to device drivers, 14% of changes are related to updating specific code for hardware architectures, 13% are related to the network stack, 5% are related to file systems and 3% are related to internal kernel subsystems.

The patch size is 72 MB (the changes affected 13.467 files, 906.147 lines of code were added, and 341.048 lines were removed).

Main novelties of the Linux Kernel 6.7

Bcachefs file system integration

Linux 6.7 adopts the Bcachefs file system code, which attempts to achieve the performance, reliability, and scalability of XFS, combined with elements of the advanced functionality found in Btrfs and ZFS.

Bcachefs supports features such as multi-device inclusion on one partition, multi-layer drive designs (the bottom layer with frequently used data based on fast SSDs and the top layer with data from less used hard drives), replication (RAID 1/10), caching, transparent data compression (LZ4, gzip and ZSTD modes), state cuts, integrity verification using checksums, ability to store Reed-Solomon error correction codes (RAID 5/6), information storage in encrypted form (ChaCha20 and Poly1305 are used). In terms of performance, Bcachefs is ahead of Btrfs and other file systems based on the copy-on-write mechanism and demonstrates an operating speed close to Ext4 and XFS.

Improvements in Btrfs

On Linux 6.7 A simplified quota mode has been implemented for Btrfs which allows for better performance by tracking extensions only in the subpartition in which they are created, which greatly simplifies calculations and improves performance, but it does not allow extensions to be shared between multiple subpartitions. In addition, a new stripe tree data structure has been added to Btrfs, suitable for logical extension mapping in situations where the physical mapping does not match between devices. The fabric is currently used in RAID0 and RAID1 implementations for zoned block devices.

Discontinuation of support for Itanium architecture (ia64)

The support for the ia64 architecture used in Intel Itanium processors, what is itus completely suspended in 2021. Intel introduced Itanium processors in 2001, but the ia64 architecture was unable to compete with AMD64, mainly due to the higher performance of AMD64 and the smoother transition from 86-bit x32 processors.  Linus Torvalds expressed his willingness to return support ia64 to the kernel, but yesonly if there is a maintainer who can demonstrate high quality of support for this platform out of the main kernel for at least a year.

Continuous migration of changes from the Rust-for-Linux branch

The new version transitions to using the Rust 1.73 version and offers a set of hooks for working with work queues.

Improvements in the implementation of FIFO queues 

In this new version of Linux 6.7 the implementation of a lightweight FIFO mechanism single-connections that require a spinlock only for dequeueing in a process context and dispense with it for atomic additions to the queue in any context. Additionally, an objpool circular buffer was added with a scalable implementation of a high-performance queue to allocate and return objects.

TLS encryption support for NVMe-TCP

On Linux 6.7 the NVMe-TCP driver (which allows you to access NVMe drives over the network), Added support for encrypting the data transmission channel using TLS (using KTLS and a background process) in tlshd userspace for connection negotiation.

Improved package scheduler performance

Optimized fq package scheduler performance, which made it possible to increase performance by 5% under heavy loads in the tcp_rr (TCP Request/Response) test and by 13% with an unlimited flow of UDP packets.

Adoption of the TCP Authentication Option

Support has been added to the TCP stack for the TCP-AO extension that allows checking TCP headers using MAC codes, using more modern HMAC-SHA1 and CMAC-AES-128 algorithms instead of the previously available TCP-MD5 option based on Legacy MD5 algorithm.

Of the other changes that stand out:

• New settings have been added «cpuset.cpus.exclusive" and "cpuset.cpus.exclusive. Effective» to cpuset for CPU exclusive binding.
• The BPF subsystem implements support for exceptions, which are processed as an emergency exit from a BPF program with the ability to safely unroll stack frames. Additionally, BPF programs allow the use of kptr pointers in connection with the CPU.
• For ARM32 and S390x architectures, support for the current set (cpuv4) of BPF instructions has been added.
• For RISC-V architecture, it is possible to use the Shadow-Call Stack check mode available in Clang 17, designed to protect against overwriting the return address of a function in the event of a buffer overflow on the stack.
• A new intelligent memory page scanning mode has been added to the mechanism for merging identical memory pages (
• AppArmor has added the ability to control access to the io_uring mechanism and create user namespaces, allowing you to selectively allow access to these capabilities only to certain processes.
• Added VM Certification API to verify the integrity of the VM startup process.
• LoongArch systems support virtualization using the KVM hypervisor.
• Added initial support for GSP-RM firmware to the Nouveau kernel module, which is used in the NVIDIA RTX 20+ GPU to move initialization and control operations from the GPU to the side of a GSP microcontroller

finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.