The Linux kernel 6.5 has features like MIDI 2.0 support in ALSA, ACPI support for the RISC-V architecture, Landlock support for UML (User-Mode Linux), better support for AMD "Zen" systems, as well as user-space support for the ARMv8.8 memcpy/memset instructions.

Linux 6.5 supports Intel TPMI (Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface) for the power capping subsystem and a TPMI interface driver for Intel RAPL, and the "runnable boosting" feature in the EAS balancer to improve CPU utilization for specific workloads.

This release also improves SMP scheduling's load balancer to recognize SMT cores with more than one busy sibling and allows lower-priority CPUs to pull tasks to avoid superfluous migrations, and improves EXT4 file system's journalling, block allocator subsystems, and performance for parallel DIO overwrites.