After seven release candidates, the Linux 4.6 kernel was officially released by Linus Torvalds on May 15. As the third Linux kernel released in 2016, the Linux 4.6 kernel is here 8 weeks after the Linux 4.5 kernel. It includes many changes, such as support for the OrangeFS file system, USB 3.1 SuperSpeed Plus protocol, and better driver support.
The Linux 4.6 kernel has been codenamed “Charred Weasel.” After seven Release Candidate builds in total and two months of development, the final production version of the kernel is here with new features, security improvements, and updated drivers.
Since the 4.6 kernel was released on time, Torvalds announced that he will start merging the window pull requests for the 4.7 kernel from May 17.
The new features of the Linux 4.6 kernel
With the form of major changes coming to the kernel, Linux 4.6 brings full support for the USB 3.1 SuperSpeed Plus protocol, giving you transfer speeds up to 10Gbps, compared to the 5Gbps speed of USB 3 and the 480Mbps speed of USB 2.0.
The other big features coming to Linux are support for the OrangeFS distributed file system along with support for Intel Memory key protection and improvements to the Out Of Memory task killer.
To make the open-source AMD graphics driver stack more stable, various improvements have also been made to AMDGPU and Radeon.
The Linux 4.6 kernel version also brings 3D/acceleration support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 “Maxwell”. Please note that this is merely an initial support and does not provide any re-clocking support.
With the new Kernel Connection Multiplexor (KCM) technology, networking also got a boost with the ability to use TCP to send and receive protocol .
With the new driver changes, Dell and Alienware laptops, including the Dell XPS 13 Skylake, are now better supported.
Other changes in the Linux 4.6 kernel include: 802.1AE MAC level encryption support, BATMAN V protocol support, pNFS SCSI layout support and online inode checker for the OCFS2file system.
Linux 4.6 kernel is available for download at Kernel.org
