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LWN on 6.15 merge window and the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit
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The first part of the 6.15 merge window
As of this writing, 6,653 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel repository for the 6.15 release. This merge window is thus well underway. A number of significant changes have been merged so far; read on for our summary of the first half of the 6.15 merge window.
- Reporting from the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit:
- An update on GCC BPF support: GCC has been slowly catching up to Clang for compiling to BPF. This session goes into the details of that work.
- Updates on storage standards: a look at progress in the standards for NVMe, SCSI, and ATA.
- A process for handling Rust code in the core kernel: introducing a new taxonomy of approaches to Rust code, and how to make the merging of that code work better.
- A herd of migration discussions: the ability to move folios around in physical memory is crucial for system performance, but that ability cannot always be taken for granted. Three sessions discussed migration and how to make it faster and more reliable.
- Improving the merging of anonymous VMAs: properly managing adjacent memory areas improves performance and reliability, but is not always easily done.
- Memory persistence over kexec: part of the thorny problem of updating the kernel on a cloud server without disturbing the guests running there.
- Slab allocator: sheaves and any-context allocations: a pair of slab-allocator discussions focusing on the new "sheaves" caching layer and ways of allocating memory safely in any execution context.
- Approaches to reducing TLB pressure: making better use of the CPU's translation lookaside buffer is often the key to better performance; what can the kernel do to help?