Kernel Watch
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so that you don’t have to.
It’s that time of year again when we kid ourselves into a shiny new gym membership as part of a New Year’s resolution. We’ll go every day, right? Well, either way, we wish all readers a happy and healthy 2025. And with that, it seems appropriate to reminisce a little about what happened in 2024 and make some kernels following the closure of the merge window (period of time during which disruptive changes are allowed). If all goes according to plan, this means that we will not be far into the new year before there is a shiny new 6.13 available. The new kernel includes the usual host of driver updates and fixes, as well as support for lazy preemption (which we discussed last time), (guest) support for Confidential Compute on Arm, and a new internal safety feature for guard pages either side of valid memory regions that can be used to catch out of bounds memory accesses in applications more easily.