Linux kernel 6.8 is out now with lots of new features

Linux kernel 6.8 has been released now by Linus Torvalds and as usual, there's absolutely tons of changes and new features.

From the release announcement: "This is not the historically big release that 6.7 was - we seem to be back to a fairly average release size for the last few years. You can see it in the overall diffstats too - this looks like an average release in pretty much all respects, and we don't have (for example) any obvious big new filesystems or architectures. I think the biggest single new thing in 6.8 is probably the new Xe drm driver, but honestly, the big bulk of changes are just various random updates and fixes all over." — Linus Torvalds

Just a small selection of what's new includes:

• New Intel Xe GPU driver.
• Lenovo Legion Go controllers support in xpad.
• AMDGPU has a bunch of new colour management code that is being used in the Steam Deck.
• Improved Steam Deck OLED support.
• Added a hotkey to switch between gamepad mode and mouse/keyboard mode to the HID driver for Valve's Steam Controller - mirroring the behaviour in the Steam client.
• Added support for Nintendo Switch Online controllers - SNES, Genesis and N64.
• Support for the Anberic RG351V, Powkiddy X55 and RK2023 handhelds.
• New driver for Adafruit Mini I2C Seesaw gamepad.
• Apple M1 USB4/Thunderbolt DART support.
• Support poweroff on Orange Pi 5.
• Raspberry Pi 5 support for V3D graphics driver.
• Intel Lunar Lake support for Thunderbolt.
• Various other new hardware support, filesystem improvements and the list goes on and on.

The full complete kernel 6.8 changelog is here.