I have to admit I was worried. In all the time I've been following kernel releases, Linus Torvalds has never missed a date. There may have been times when the schedule was different, but there was no stable version, no RC, no release... What could have happened to him? Fortunately, nothing. And now we have the latest release. Linux 6.14, the new version that, as expected, has arrived… well, on Sunday + a few hours.
What happened was simply carelessness. Basically, although he is labeled of "incompetent", he lost track of time. And he is a human being, even if it doesn't seem like one to some. Linux 6.14 is now available with the News list which you have below, obtained from Phoronix, as usual.
What's New in Linux 6.14
- Processors:
- RISC-V is now mitigated for the GhostWrite vulnerability.
- TLB Flushing scalability optimizations have been merged to help AMD and Intel CPUs.
- Various improvements to Linux x86 KVM.
- The AMD AE4DMA driver was also introduced in Linux 6.14.
- Support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC.
- Support for the Blaize BLZP1600 SoC.
- Support for SpacemiT K1 RISC-V SoC.
- Many changes in the AMD P-State driver.
- Faster AES-GCM and AES-XTS cryptography for AMD CPUs.
- A new “AMD Node” driver option to separate itself from legacy AMD Northbridge code.
- Several other new AMD CPU features.
- Better management of AMD Preferred Core.
- Continued improvements to the Intel TDX code for Trust Domain Extensions with Confidential Compute VMs.
- The Turbostat tool is now available for Intel's Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest CPUs.
- Intel Thermal Controller Preparations for Panther Lake.
- EDAC driver preparations for Intel Clearwater Forest.
- LoongArch's EDAC CPU + ECC memory controller has been merged.
- Resource control for monitoring total memory bandwidth.
- Perf support for up to 2.048 CPU cores.
- Linux on laptops:
- Support for the Microsoft Copilot key found on some new laptop models such as Lenovo.
- Much faster suspend and resume support for some systems.
- Many driver updates for AMD x86 platforms.
- Intel THC drivers for the Touch Host Controller IP have been merged.
- linux-gaming:
- The NTSYNC driver is now considered complete to better emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives on Linux. NTSYNC can be used in the future with Wine/Steam Play (Proton) once user-space patches are implemented to allow for improved Windows game performance with some titles.
- More game controllers supported by XPad controller.
- Stand for the SteelSeries Arctis 9 headset.
- GPUs / Graphics:
- The AMDXDNA driver has been merged for Ryzen AI NPU hardware support, which resides under the "accel" section of the DRM subsystem. AMDXDNA provides all the kernel bits needed to support AMD Ryzen AI NPUs in the mainline Linux kernel.
- New “DMEM” cgroup for memory on devices such as GPUs and other locally memory-connected hardware.
- Thunderbolt UHBR rate support for upcoming Panther Lake Xe3 graphics. There is also further work in progress to enable the Xe kernel driver for Panther Lake/Xe3 integrated graphics support.
- The AMDGPU driver now has DRM Panic support for the Linux Blue Screen of Death.
- Cleaner AMD shader support for more GPUs.
- More AMD RDNA4 preparations for the upcoming Radeon RX 90x0 series graphics cards.
- The new DRM boot logger for kernel messages. With working NTSYNC driver, AMD Ryzen AI Accelerator Support
- Storage / File Systems:
- Improvements to the Bcachefs filesystem driver to remove the "experimental" flag from this copy-on-write filesystem.
- Uncached Buffered I/O support was merged.
- IO_uring with FUSE for better FUSE filesystem performance.
- NFS gained Direct I/O with LOCALIO and attribute delegation support.
- F2FS converted more I/O paths to using folios.
- Reduced SquashFS memory usage.
- Improved read performance for CIFS.
- Better real-time device support with XFS.
- A performance benefit from caching symbolic link lengths within inodes.
- Btrfs gains a round-robin RAID1 option.
- STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN to fix a performance issue.
- A new mountinfo tool is included with the Linux kernel source tree and to demonstrate the kernel's statmount() and listmount() interfaces.
- The PCI NVMe endpoint feature target driver has been merged for resourceful use cases.
- Other Hardware:
- The NVIDIA VFIO driver is being prepared for Blackwell.
- SoundWire Multi-Lane support for using multiple data lanes when high bandwidth is needed for SoundWire audio devices.
- Preparations for CXL around Type 2 and CXL 3.1 devices.
- Intel has contributed a Thunderbolt 3 AltMode driver along with other USB/Thunderbolt improvements.
- Hardware sensor monitoring for more desktop motherboards.
- Support for several new sound chipsets, as well as the Focusrite Scarlett 4th Gen 16i16, 18i16, and 18i20 digital audio USB interfaces.
- ROCEv2 support for Alibaba Cloud ERDMA controller.
- FPGA support for AAEON UP maker boards.
- Many improvements in wired and wireless network drivers.
- Rust for Linux:
- The gendwarfksyms tool has been merged to help with Rust efforts.
- Another important milestone for Rust code.
- Almost at the stage of being able to write real Rust drivers now that more of the PCI and device platform driver abstractions are in place for Rust.
- Other improvements:
- Removal of the deprecated EFI UGA protocol.
- KUnit will now use hardware acceleration by default for faster testing.
- Easier debugging of early boot problems.
- VirtualBox guest support for ARM64 virtual machines.
- Many improvements in the programmer.
- Support for adjusting the "pid_max" value on a per-PID namespace basis to help older programs in particular
- Faster /proc/kcore reads for Drgn debugging.
- Linux Security:
- User address masking now uses the CMOV instruction.
- Landlock's LSM can now handle "rare" files.
- Changed the default signing module from SHA1 to SHA512 to match what is already done by a number of Linux distribution kernel vendors.
- AT_EXECVE_CHECK to help with consistent security.
Linux 6.14 has been announced a few moments ago and its tarball should soon appear in kernel.orgIts arrival in different distributions depends on the philosophy of each one.