Linux 6.15 now available, last week brings improvements to HP ZBooks and Bcachefs

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.15, albeit after a few hour delay thanks to a last minute bug report which saw a feature get turned off, for now. He said that the last week of development looked pretty normal with small fixes all over, with drivers receiving the lion's share of them. This week, improvements were added for an array of devices including HP ZBook laptops, and there were software improvements for Bcachefs and io_uring.

The development of Linux 6.16 will begin today when the merge window opens, so it won’t be long until we start getting release candidates for that version. Things could get off to a slow start on Monday, however, because in the US it’s memorial day and people may be taking a break, but the merge window will still open - with Torvalds saying: “but like the USPS, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” - nor memorial day - stops the merge window.” Except last year, when an ice storm during winter did stop the merge window.

Hardware updates

In terms of specific hardware support mentioned in this week’s log, we have:

• HP ZBook laptops: Improved micmute LED functionality.
• Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 14ASP10: A new quirk to address specific hardware behavior.
• Dell Chrome platform laptops: Restoration of auto-mute mode.
• HP Agusta laptops: New support for the CS35L41 HDA audio chip.
• Marvell uDPU: Definition of pinctrl state for alarm LEDs.
• Allwinner H6: A revert related to its PMIC connection.
• Intel Arrow Lake U/H NPU: A fix for its PCI ID within the power management controller.
• Fujitsu Lifebook S2110: Added support for hotkeys.
• Rockchip RK3576: New clock definitions and a power-down workaround for its SDHCI controller.

Software updates

On the software side of things, this week saw Bcachefs get some updates related to casefolding, improving case-insensitive directory support. For those that don't know, Bcachefs is a newer file system introduced in 2015 for Linux that aims to compete with ZFS and Btrfs on features, while delivering the speed and performance of ext4 and XFS. As for casefolding, this is a process that converts your searches into lowercase when searching case-insensitive file systems, this week's enhancements ensure this is more reliable.

There are improvements to io_uring which could lead to better network performance, the memory management (mm) subsystem has received a bunch of updates that include fixes and performance enhancements, including refinements for buffer handling and protections against some memory vulnerabilities.

If you want to read about this week’s fixes in detail, you can check out the entry over on LKML.

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