Jon Masters keeps up with all the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
Linus Torvalds announced one of the final Release Candidates for what will be Linux 6.7 (-rc5), making us on track to start the new year with a shiny new 6.7 kernel, and the corresponding twoweek merge window for new features that will eventually stabilise into 6.8.
Just in time for the new year, the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) is moving servers as vger.kernel.org is finally decommissioned. Hopefully folks won’t notice the transition to modern infrastructure.
That was 2023
2023 was another very busy year in the Linux community. It started with the Linux 6.2 kernel cycle, the first to include baseline useful bits of Rust language support.
Also included was Apple Silicon M2 Macs (6.4, in May) and mount-beneath (6.5, in September) for updating the underlay layers of overlay filesystems used to construct containers – in other words, allowing for the update of container base layers more easily. The year rounded out with Linux 6.7, which includes the removal of Itanium architecture support and the addition of a new filesystem called bcachefs, covered last month.
There was a number of broad themes in developments throughout the year, among them growing momentum for Rust as an alternative for certain Linux driver code, upstream support for various Confidential Computing (CoCo) implementations from the various architectures (Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP, Arm’s Realms and RISC-V’s CoVE), and the continuation of CPU security vulnerabilities as well as their mitigations. On the latter front, we witnessed yet another vulnerability just this past month in the form of a SLAM (Spectre based on Linear Address Masking), which attacks a feature only recently merged into the kernel for certain upcoming CPUs.
Looking on to the year ahead, it seems likely there will be growing debate around upcoming European legislation named CRA (Cyber Resilience Act) since it has implications in terms of potential liability for individual open source developers who contribute to large projects. Like many such laws and regulations, the CRA is well meaning, aiming to improve the overall robustness of software (within the EU), but it might just have a number of unintended consequences and fallout as it is implemented.
It seems likely 2024 will see growing adoption of Rust across the industry, and in particular within Linux. The language
