Kernel Watch
Jon Masters keeps up with all the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.8, noting that the development cycle had been calm over the trailing couple of weeks, “just as it should be”. The new kernel includes many performance enhancements under the bonnet. Among these are support for variable (multi) sized Transparent Huge Pages (THP), meaning that the kernel can now automatically handle memory using much larger pages while allowing multiple different huge page sizes, as opposed to the old-school approach of boot time selection (this is something that certain large workloads, such as databases, will enjoy). The new kernel also removes support for the venerable SLAB memory allocator, long since replaced by SLUB. An allocator manages ‘arenas’ of memory for easier data structure allocation.