{"id":106007,"date":"2022-12-12T09:36:41","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T07:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/novosti-interneta\/reliz-yadra-linux-6-1"},"modified":"2026-02-08T18:56:03","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T16:56:03","slug":"reliz-yadra-linux-6-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/news\/reliz-yadra-linux-6-1","title":{"rendered":"Release of Linux kernel 6.1","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"
After two months of development, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux kernel 6.1. Among the most notable changes are: support for developing drivers and modules in the Rust language, an upgraded mechanism for identifying used memory pages, a special memory manager for BPF programs, a memory issue diagnostics system called KMSAN, a protection mechanism known as KCFI (Kernel Control-Flow Integrity), and the introduction of the Maple tree structure. <\/p>\n
The new version includes 15,115 fixes from 2,139 developers, with a patch size of 51 MB, which is about half the size of patches from kernels 6.0 and 5.19. The changes affected 13,165 files, with 716,247 lines of code added and 304,560 lines removed. About 45% of the changes presented in 6.1 are related to device drivers, approximately 14% concern updates to architecture-specific code, 14% are related to the network stack, 3% pertain to file systems, and 3% involve internal kernel subsystems. <\/p>\n
Key innovations in kernel 6.1: <\/p>\n
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Memory and system services<\/b>\n
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Support for using Rust as a second language for developing drivers and kernel modules has been added. The main motivation for supporting Rust is to simplify the writing of safe and high-quality device drivers by reducing the likelihood of errors when handling memory. Rust support is disabled by default and does not make Rust a mandatory build dependency for the kernel. The kernel currently accepts a minimal trimmed version of patches, reduced from 40,000 to 13,000 lines of code, ensuring only the necessary minimum required to build a simple kernel module written in Rust. Future plans include gradually increasing the existing functionality by migrating other changes from the Rust-for-Linux branch. Concurrently, projects are underway to utilize the proposed infrastructure for developing drivers for NVMe storage, the 9p network protocol, and Apple M1 GPUs using Rust.\n
For systems based on AArch64, RISC-V, and LoongArch architectures with EFI, support for direct booting of compressed kernel images has been implemented. Handlers for loading, launching, and unloading kernel images have been added, callable directly from EFI zboot. Also, handlers for installing and removing protocols from the EFI protocol database have been introduced. Previously, unpacking was performed by a separate loader, but now this can be done by the handler within the kernel\u2014forming the kernel image as an EFI application.\n
Part of the patches implementing a multi-level memory management model has been included, allowing for the separation of memory banks with different performance characteristics. For example, the most frequently used pages can be placed in the fastest memory, while seldom used pages can be stored in relatively slower memory. A mechanism for identifying the location of frequently used pages in slow memory has been adopted into the 6.1 kernel to promote them to fast memory, and a general concept of memory levels and their relative performance has been realized.\n
The MGLRU (Multi-Generational LRU) mechanism has been integrated, which replaced the old implementation of LRU (Least Recently Used) based on two queues with a multi-tiered structure that better identifies which memory pages are genuinely in use and which can be evicted to swap space.\n