Torvalds gibt Linux 6.15 frei | heise online heise.de/-10397961 #Betriebssystem #Linux #LinuxKernel #Linux615

Torvalds gibt Linux 6.15 frei

Torvalds gibt Linux 6.15 frei | heise online
https://heise.de/-10397961 #Betriebssystem #Linux #LinuxKernel #Linux615

Linux 6.15 will support Apple Z2 Touch Bar

Linux 6.15 is growing up with more and more improvements and support for more devices, including Apple MacBook laptops with the Z2 Touch Bar. This is for the Apple Silicon devices that rely on the Z2 protocol to make the Touch Bar work on macOS, but Linux 6.15 will have support for the Touch Bar in such devices.

The apple_z2 driver was merged to the kernel prior to the first release candidate. This driver enables Linux to utilize the Apple Touch Bar in MacBooks that use the Silicon hardware using the Z2 protocol. It was developed by the Asahi Linux developers as they’re enhancing the experience of Linux desktop in such devices.

When this Linux version gets released to the public, which should happen after several release candidates, users with MacBook laptops with the Touch Bar will be able to use it in Linux distributions.

As an aside, we expect that Linux 6.15 RC1 will be out today, provided that everything goes fine during development. This is so that curious people and advanced users will be able to test this version of Linux.

#Apple #Kernel #Linux #Linux615 #LinuxKernel #MacBook #MacBookPro #news #Tech #Technology #TouchBar #update

Linux 6.15 Memory Management improvements

The upcoming version of Linux will incorporate many memory management improvements that will make your PC better than before. This pull request, which is already migrated to the main Linux 6.15 Git, incorporates many memory management changes that will achieve that goal of making your PC manage memory better than before. As this pull request mentions a possible Linux 6.15 RC1 release by just a title, we expect that this release candidate will be released on April 6th.

A new command-line options, hugetlb_alloc_threads, has been added to the Linux kernel that allows you to choose how many threads are in use, with the default being a reasonable 25% to make your computer boot up faster. This is when allocating a large number of huge pages, which will see around 2.75x to 4.3x speedup on Skylake and Cascade Lake systems.

Alongside with this change, there is another interesting patch series that revolved around making the huge pages allocator more reliable than before. It reduces fragmentation to allow larger requests to be met more quickly, while making the operation cheaper.

In the pull request linked above, you can find a list of patch series that are merged to the Linux 6.15 source code.

#Computer #Computers #improvements #Linux #Linux615 #Memory #MemoryManagement #news #performance #Ram #Tech #Technology #update

Linux 6.15 will support ASUS Zenbook A14

ASUS Zenbook A14 is an ARM64-based laptop that uses the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipset (either X1-26-100 or X1P-42-100 with 45 TOPS). ASUS considers it as a Copilot+ PC that weighs under 1 kg and promises up to 32 hours of battery life. The laptop features a 1920×1200 14-inch OLED display, 16 GB or 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and 512 GB or 1 TB of NVMe storage. It runs Windows 11 as a primary operating system.

As for the chassis, the Ceraluminum chassis is a military-grade US MIL-STD 810H standard to ensure that your laptop is the toughest. Right now, it only supports Windows, but open source developers are working towards opening support for this laptop to run Linux efficiently.

Linux 6.15 ensures that this happens by adding support for this laptop. Right now, support is similar to other Snapdragon X1-based laptops, which means that the following features are not expected to work: (listed below is the abovementioned laptop in this case)

• Audio (Speakers/microphones/headphone jack)
• Camera (OmniVision OV02C10)
• HDMI (Parade PS185HDM)
• EC

The following features have been added to support said laptop as of this patch series:

• Keyboard
• Touchpad
• NVME
• Lid switch
• Camera LED
• eDP (FHD OLED, SDC420D) with brightness control
• Bluetooth, WiFi (WCN6855)
• USB Type-A port
• USB Type-C ports in USB2/USB3/DP (both orientations)
• aDSP/cDPS firmware loading, battery info
• Sleep/suspend, nothing visibly broken on resume

However, the key differences were:

• Wifi/Bluetooth combo being Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 on UX3407QA and Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 on UX3407RA
• USB Type-C retimers are Parade PS8833, appear to behave identical to Parade PS8830
• gpio90 is TZ protected

However, those additions are currently under review and will land to the main Linux 6.15 branch once accepted.

Cover image by ASUS

#ASUS #Computer #Computers #Copilot_ #CopilotPC #Laptop #Laptops #Linux #Linux615 #news #Tech #Technology #update