Download Linux Kernel 6.1.2 Download | TechSpot

Linux refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating systems that use the Linux kernel. Linux can be installed on a wide variety of hardware, from mobile phones, tablets, routers and video game consoles, to mainframes and supercomputers. Linux is a leading server operating system, running the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world.

The development of Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source collaboration; typically, all of the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed, both commercially and non-commercially, by anyone under licenses such as the GNU General Public License. Typically, Linux is packaged in a format known as a Linux distribution for desktop and server use. Some popular mainstream Linux distributions include Debian (and its derivatives such as Ubuntu), Fedora, and openSUSE. Linux distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting tools and libraries to fulfill the distribution’s intended use.

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Main line

The mainline tree is maintained by Linus Torvalds. It is the tree where all new features are introduced and where all the exciting new developments happen. New mainline cores are released every 2-3 years. month.

Stable

After each mainline kernel is released, it is considered “stable”. Any bug fixes for a stable kernel are backported from the mainline tree and applied by a designated stable kernel maintainer. There are usually only a few bugfix kernel releases until the next mainline kernel becomes available — unless it’s designated as a “long-term maintenance kernel.” Stable kernel updates are released as needed, usually once a week.

Long term

There are usually several “long-term maintenance” kernel releases issued for the purpose of backporting bug fixes for older kernel trees. Only important bug fixes are applied to such kernels, and they usually don’t see very frequent releases, especially for older trees.

What is new

Of course, “nothing fundamentally different with this release” doesn’t mean there aren’t many changes. There are about 13.5k non-merge commits here (and 800+ merges), so 6.0 looks to be another pretty significant release.

I was actually hoping we’d get some of the first rust infrastructure, and multi-gen LRU VM, but neither happened this time. There are always more releases. But there is a lot of continued development pretty much all over the place, with the “shortlog” being far too long to post and so – as always for rc1 messages – below contains only my “merge log”. You can definitely get some kind of high-level overview just by scanning it, but obviously it’s worth pointing out that the people mentioned in the merge log are just the maintainers I’m pulling from, and there are more than 1700 developers involved when you start . looking at all the details in the git tree.

And once again, this is one of those releases where you shouldn’t look at the diffstat too closely, because more than half of it is yet another AMD GPU registry dump. And the Habanalabs Gaudi2 people want to play in that space too, but they don’t quite reach the same high results that the AMD GPU people have become so famous for. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

The CPU folks also show up in the JSON files describing the perf events, but they look absolutely tiny compared to the ‘asic_reg’ auto-generated GPU and AI hardware definitions.

So just avoid these parts if you decide you actually want to look at the diffs yourself. Once you’ve done that, the stats look pretty normal, with about 60% driver updates (across everything, but gpu, networking and sound are the big updates – again, that’s pretty much par for the course). The rest is a mix of sheet updates, filesystems, tools, and just random changes all over the place.

In all its glory (so all those AMD GPU hardware definitions etc included), there are 13099 files changed, 1280295 insertions(+), 341210 deletions(-). Full release notes for Linux Kernel 6.0.1 can be found here.