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#linuxkernel

22 posts18 participants0 posts today
Public
Aptivi

Linux Weekly Releases (Week 22 – 5/31/2025)

Every week, new Linux versions that are under a supported version series get released to incorporate bug fixes and other general improvements that are pushed to the servicing branches. This ensures that your Linux user experience gets better when latest versions fix some of the bugs.

This week, the below Linux kernel versions are released:

SeriesVersionFull sourcePatchSignatureDatev6.12.xv6.12.31LinkLinkLink5/29/2025v6.14.xv6.14.9LinkLinkLink5/29/2025v6.15.xv6.15.0LinkLinkLink5/26/2025

Please note that the downloads are in the source code form, so this means that you may have to compile from source in order to use one of the Linux versions shown above. Your distribution might not include the above Linux versions.

#Kernel#Linux#LinuxKernel
Public
Aptivi

Linux 6.16 needs GCC 8 and Binutils 2.30

The upcoming version of Linux now needs at least GCC 8 and GNU Binutils 2.30 to be able to successfully build, because this was needed to remove all legacy code that provided workarounds for build systems prior to GCC 8, which became a maintenance burden. Previously, GCC 5 and Binutils 2.25 were required to build Linux, and the latest version, 6.15, had this requirement before 6.16 increased it.

GCC 8 and Binutils 2.30 brought new features that Linux 6.16 needed, while LLVM Clang 13 was the minimum requirement for Linux in case you’ll need to use LLVM instead of the legacy GCC.

You can see the merge request below.

See merge request

The reasoning for this minimum version requirement bump is here:

x86 already uses gcc-8 as the minimum version, this changes all other architectures to the same version. gcc-8 is used is Debian 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, both of which are still supported, and binutils 2.30 is the oldest corresponding version on those.

Ubuntu Pro 18.04 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 both use gcc-7 as the system compiler but additionally include toolchains that remain supported.

With the new minimum toolchain versions, a number of workarounds for older versions can be dropped, in particular on x86_64 and arm64. Importantly, the updated compiler version allows removing two of the five remaining gcc plugins, as support for sancov and structeak features is already included in modern compiler versions.

I tried collecting the known changes that are possible based on the new toolchain version, but expect that more cleanups will be possible.

Since this touches multiple architectures, I merged the patches through the asm-generic tree.”

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

#Binutils#GCC#Linux
Public
Thorsten Leemhuis (acct. 1/4)

Media even without AI manages to deliberately or accidentally misinform us all the time[1]. The screenshotted article below is an example of this, as #Linux (the #Kernel) as of now still supports 486-style CPUs.

So let me repeat[2]:

Patches to remove 486-style CPUs support were discussed[3], but were not merged for #LinuxKernel 6.15. They are not even yet queued for 6.16, the version currently in development. But a developer likely will submit them[4] – then it's up to Linus if he will merge them immediately for 6.16 or let them wait till 6.17 to ensure they are tested in -next for a while, as bigger kernel changes are supposed to.

[1] See also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Man

[2] hachyderm.io/@kernellogger/114

[3] lore.kernel.org/lkml/202505150

[4] lore.kernel.org/lkml/aCX9iN5Bx

Screenshot of the head of https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/28/kernel_615_arrives/
Public
Aptivi

Linux 6.16 yields improved EXT4 performance!

As part of the changes that are done in Linux 6.16, there are some of the very interesting changes that are done to the EXT4 filesystem. Those changes yield improved performance, causing you to have a faster EXT4 filesystem compared to the recently released Linux 6.15.

Those changes have been made to improve the filesystem performance, which will be pushed to the v6.16 development branch from this PR, including:

  • Fast commit performance improvements
  • Multi-fsblock atomic write support for bigalloc file systems
  • Large folio support for regular files

The large folio support for regular files was, in itself, a factor of the improvements, along with all other changes, which yielded over 37% performance increase according to the kernel test robot that made this report you can see here. According to the test robot, it has reported that it had noticed a 37.7% improvement on fsmark.files_per_sec.

The large folio support for regular files has been added with this patch, which checks for the following conditions in the ext4_should_enable_large_folio() function before enabling such support:

  • If i_mode on an inode is a regular file using the S_ISREG() macro
  • If either the data flags on the superblock or the inode flags has the journal data flags
  • If the superblock has no verity and has no encryption support

Also, Linux 6.16 fixes some corruption bugs on an EXT4 file system caused by race conditions in the extent status tree. Those race conditions were potentially manifested from the heavy simultaneous allocation and deallocation to a single file.

Expect the first release candidate of Linux 6.16 in the next two weeks!

#EXT4#Filesystem#Linux
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