Nice
Here’s the TL;DR from Phoronix:
#AMD
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AMD P-State Preferred Core handling for modern Ryzen systems. This is for leveraging ACPI CPPC data between CPU cores for improving task placement on AMD Ryzen systems for cores that can achieve higher frequencies and also helping in hybrid selection between say Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores. This AMD Preferred Core support has been in development since last year.
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Performance gains on AMD 4th Gen EPYC
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AMD FRU Memory Poison Manager merged along with other work as part of better supporting the AMD MI300 series.
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AMD has continued upstreaming more RDNA3+ refresh and RDNA4 graphics hardware support into the AMDGPU driver.
#Intel
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Intel Xeon Max gains in some AI workloads
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Intel FRED was merged for Flexible Return and Event Delivery with future Intel CPUs to overhaul CPU ring transitions.
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Reworked x86 topology code for better handling Intel Core hybrid CPUs.
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Intel Fastboot support is now enabled across all supported graphics generations.
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Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” tuning that can yield nice performance improvements for those using new Intel laptops.
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Continued work on the experimental Intel Xe DRM kernel graphics driver that Intel is aiming to get ready in time for Xe2 / Lunar Lake.
Video, Filesystem & Network
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Support for larger frame-buffer console fonts with modern 4K+ displays.
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Dropping the old NTFS driver.
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Improved case-insensitive file/folder handling.
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Performance optimizations for Btrfs.
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More efficient discard and improved journal pipelining for Bcachefs.
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FUSE passthrough mode finally made it to the mainline kernel.
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More online repair improvements for XFS.
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Much faster exFAT performance when engaging the “dirsync” mount option.
Full summary here: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-69-features/
It refers to modern Intel CPUs where there are two types of cores - performance cores (P-cores) and efficient cores (E-cores). This is similar to ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture which we’ve seen in smartphones for many years already.
See: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/how-hybrid-design-works.html
12th gen and up intel CPUs. All but a few have P and E cores.
Also like one weird i5 from about 10th gen.
Dropping the old NTFS driver.
Good stuff. Hasn’t there always been confusion on mounting your NTFS drive using the old driver vs the new?
Indeed. But I think some confusion will still remain as long as the ntfs-3g FUSE driver is still included by distros. Because right now, you have to explicitly specify the filesystem type as ntfs3 if you want to use the new in-kernel driver, otherwise it would use ntfs-3g. And most guides on the web still haven’t been updated to use ntfs3 in the fstab, so I’m afraid this confusion will continue to persist for some time.
I’ve had bad experiences with ntfs3 anyway, so it’s probably for the best that ntfs-3g is the default. Also last I checked ntfs3 had effectively been orphaned by paragon (the developers), is that still the case?
ntfs3 has had several improvements in 6.2 and 6.8, and it’s been pretty stable for me of late. I use it to share/backup my Steam game library mainly + for my portable drives for general data storage/local backups, and haven’t had any issues.
It’s not orphaned. There was a bit of lull after it was introduced in kernel 5.15, and yes it was a bit unstable in the 5.x series, but it’s been pretty good since 6.2 where they finally introduced the nocase and windows_names mount options. The performance improvements are worth it if you use NTFS heavily, so I would personally recommend switching.
INTERNET FUNNY NUMBER LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOO
69, interrupted with a period? Not nice
