Linux 6.0

The Linux 6.0 kernel is out, formerly "5.20," and on its way to a distro near you. Keeping in mind that no Linux numerical release corresponds to any particular milestone, real or imagined, the marquee improvements include more graphics hardware support, XFS performance and scalability improvements (I like this in particular since my Fedora root is still XFS), further preparations for Compute Express Link, zero-copy send for networking and io_uring userspace block driver support.

On the PowerPC and Power ISA side this release is largely fixes, but notable new improvements are support for syscall stack randomization, a driver for the PowerVM Platform KeyStore, and atomic operations with the 32 and 64-bit BPF JITs. If you work on 64-bit Book3E hardware, now you also get full KASAN.

As a postscript in the no-country-for-old-hardware dept., support was withdrawn for the NEC VR4100 MIPS CPU family, which among other systems powers the IBM WorkPad z50 and the Agenda VR3 Linux PDA, and support for VMEbus was moved to staging with the threat to remove it entirely if there's no maintainer. Sadly won't be me since I don't have any VME hardware currently.