Linux Kernel 6.16 Lands With 38 Million Lines of Code
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Over the weekend, the world's most famous Finn pushed out the latest version of the Linux kernel - and warned of upcoming disruption.
Linux kernel 6.16 was released after what was apparently a relaxed end of the development cycle. (We suppose this could be interpreted as a subtle dig at certain file system developers, but then again, Torvalds is not famed for subtlety.)
As kernel releases go, this one is almost unusually modest. It doesn't have any huge blockbuster new features, but does contain a large number of bugfixes and code. Phoronix estimates that it has 38.4 million lines of code across over 78,000 files. Remember when the central design ethos of UNIX was that it was small and simple and clean? Well, no, me neither, because around the time The Reg FOSS desk first touched a computer keyboard, UNIX System III came out, one of the first releases that unified different codebases, and also one of the first commercial editions from AT&T. But that was the idea, right?
Kernel 6.16 supports Intel's 2023 Advanced Performance Extensions, which means improved vector instructions and doubling the number of general-purpose registers available. (Only certain CPU models benefit from the full-width version of the new vector instructions, though, which is arguably an example of the sort of moves that caused Intel to falter in recent years.)
Two of the built-in file systems get performance tweaks that allow for larger individual blocks of data. XFS, open sourced by SGI at the turn of the century, now gets larger atomic writes. Meanwhile, ext4 gets bigalloc and large folio support, which can make some operations about one-third faster. Btrfs and NFS both get tweaks, too.
On pretty much any Unix, when a program crashes, it emits a core dump and saves it in the current working directory. Among other improvements, now a core can be sent over an AF_SOCKET instead. This means both functional improvements as well as security ones.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.