GPU/Audio Updates:

• The Nouveau driver for Nvidia GPUs now supports larger page sizes and compression, leading to better performance, especially for GPUs that do not have the same sophisticated circuitry as CPUs.
• Initial audio support and integrated graphics (Z3P) are enabled for Intel Nova Lake, expected in late 2026.

Network Improvements:

• A busy lock in the transfer queueing layer was replaced by a lockless list, resulting in a 4x improvement in transfer workload performance and reduced CPU cycles per packet.

Miscellaneous:

• The Memory Management Concurrency ID (MMCID) and Restartable Sequences (RSQ) subsystems received a major rewrite, leading to a 14% performance gain, especially beneficial for databases.
• printk, the command for sending text to the console, saw a 20x speedup in some real-time kernel circumstances, drastically reducing boot times.