It is wise for months, but it is still news. The fact is that Linus Torvalds announced A few hours ago the launch of Linux 6.12, and perhaps the most notable new feature is that it has included everything necessary to make us forget about the RT kernel. What is this? It was, let's talk in the past tense, a modified kernel to work better when performing tasks that required less delay, such as, for example, recording audio.
As a result, the RT kernel will cease to exist as a separate thing, and the kernel mainline, the official one, will be used to carry out this type of audiovisual tasks. But although we started this article talking about a novelty like this, what it is about is the launch of a new stable kernel versionLinux 6.12 is a release with significant new features, and it is also expected to be labeled as the 2024 LTS very soon.
Linux 6.12 Highlights
As for the news, in addition to kill RT kernel Separately, in the processor section we find that preparations to leave behind the Intel 6 family have been completed, Intel Efficiency Latency Control has been implemented for its uncore in SoCs, the Intel IFS SBAF core tests have been merged to expand the capabilities of In-Field Scan and the Intel Panther Lake and Diamond Rapids model identifiers have been added.
On the other hand, and continuing with the processors, several updates have been added for power management in Intel and AMD, the Initial support for Raspberry Pi 5 and support for Snapdragon X1 laptops with ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 hardware alongside the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7.
On the graphics side, Intel graphics driver fan speeds are now reported, Intel Panther Lake supports audio over HDMI, Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics are enabled by default, and the AMDDGPU driver has finer-grained startup handling.
Even more: What's new in file storage and networking
Bcachefs is working on removing its experimental tag, changes have been made to XFS and VFS to support block sizes larger than a page size, there are ldmapped mounts for Fuse and tethered mounts for VirtIO-FS, and XFS adds new ioctls to swap contents of two files, among other new features.
In the networking department, the NVIDIA Mellanox driver has added Multi-Path PCI, Device Memory TCP support has been merged, and support for new network cards has been added, including but not limited to the following list:
- RTL8852BT and RTL8852BE-VT.
- RTL9054.
- RTL9068.
- RTL9072.
- RTL9075.
- RTL9068.
- RTL9071.
- Motorcomm yt8821 2.5G Ethernet PHY.
- RTL8126A Rev B.
As a curiosity, I have passed that list to ChatGPT to tell me if among them is what the Steam Deck OLED uses for wireless connections. Although I would swear not, the chatbot assures me that it is the RTL8852BE, so with Linux 6.12 you could use any distro and take advantage of the WiFi without doing anything. After insisting, he confirmed that, although the characteristics match, he cannot guarantee it.
Other hardware, virtualization and security
In the other hardware section we find new features such as more CXL additions, an HDMI CEC controller for high-end 4K HDMI splitters/amplifiers, improvements to IEEE-1394 Firewire or improved support for the ASUS ROG Ally X.
On the virtualization side, VirtIO Vsoc performance has been improved, KVM virtualization can now advertise AVX10.1 support to guest VMs, Microsoft Hyper-V will boot Linux faster when there are many CPU cores, or KVM LoongArch to speed up ARM/x86 binary translation.
Security has been improved with changes such as LSM Landlock now having more controls around Unix sockets, vDSO getrandom() for five more CPU architectures, greater compile-time control over CPU security mitigations, or the new Integrity Policy Enforcement security module.
Linux 6.12 now available, coming soon to your distribution
Linux 6.12 It is now available at kernel.org, but at the moment you would have to do the manual installation. Soon, when Linux 6.12.1 is released, mass adoption will begin, first implemented by a few Rolling Release distros and later, depending on the philosophy of each one, the rest.