What’s New in Linux Kernel 6.8? Key Features, Hardware Support & Performance Boosts

Linux kernel 6.8 has been officially released and is the GA kernel for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Linus Torvalds described the release as an "average" sized version, noting no major new file systems or architectures, with the most notable addition being the experimental Intel Xe DRM driver.

New Features

The kernel introduces several hardware‑related updates, including:

Experimental Intel Xe DRM driver and early support for AMD Zen 5 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoCs.

V3D DRM driver adds Raspberry Pi 5 support (GPU‑top and FDINFO), enabling out‑of‑the‑box graphics on Mesa 23.3 and Linux 6.8.

Enhanced zswap subsystem that can force cold pages to real swap and a new mode to completely disable write‑back swap.

Prevention of direct writes to block devices of mounted filesystems (except Btrfs) to avoid corruption; this is disabled by default.

Intel P‑State driver adjustments for Meteor Lake CPUs, allowing frequencies up to 100 MHz.

Performance gains on laptops with Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen 7000/8000 CPUs, including RFI mitigation for Ryzen.

Network stack improvements that can boost TCP throughput by up to 40 % under high concurrency.

Gaming Controller Support

Nintendo Switch Online controller

Powkiddy X5 and RK2023 handheld consoles

Adafruit Mini I2C gamepad

Lenovo Legion Go controller

Color manager on Steam Deck

Official Steam controller driver fixes

Other Highlights

New statmount() and listmount() system calls

Deadline server mechanism

Rust support for LoongArch CPUs

Adjustable trace‑buffer size

KVM guest‑priority memory feature

KSM advisor for automatic KSM tuning

~11 % syscall‑entry performance boost on IBM Z

New PHY network driver written in Rust

Intel TDX host‑side support

Intel IAA compression accelerator

dmesg reports on 32‑bit support status

perf tool now supports data‑type analysis

Apple M1 Thunderbolt DART support

Bcachefs initial online fs check/repair

AppArmor switched to SHA‑256 policy hashing

RISC‑V and Other Architecture Support

Linux 6.8 adds support for AMD MicroBlaze V soft‑core RISC‑V CPUs, XIP kernel features, the riscv_hwprobe() syscall, and enables suspend‑to‑RAM on RISC‑V when the SUSP SBI extension is present, with added support for StarFive SoCs.

Getting Linux 6.8

You can download the source and compile it yourself, but most users should wait for their distribution to package the kernel. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will ship Linux 6.8 by default, and back‑ports are planned for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Caution is advised when using Canonical’s mainline kernel builds, as they lack signatures and may not receive security updates.