Today, Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 6.14, the latest stable kernel version featuring new improvements and better hardware support.
Key highlights include Btrfs RAID1 read balancing support, a new ntsync subsystem for Win NT synchronization to enhance game emulation with Wine, uncached buffered I/O support, and a new accelerator driver for AMD XDNA Ryzen AI NPUs (Neural Processing Units).
Other updates consist of DRM panic support for the AMDGPU driver, reflink and reverse-mapping for XFS real-time devices, Intel Clearwater Forest server support, SELinux extended permissions, FUSE support for io_uring, New fsnotify pre-access event and device memory cgroup controller.
Linux 6.14 also introduces core energy counter support for AMD CPUs, power supply extensions, T-Head vector extensions for RISC-V architectures, and power management suspend/resume support for Raspberry Pi devices.
Additional features include KVM hypercall service support for usermode VMM on LoongArch, a new PCI error recovery mechanism for IBM System/390, SRSO_USER_KERNEL_NO support for AMD hardware, and manual fan control for Dell XPS 9370 laptops.
The update adds support for a wider range of MBQ access sizes, deferred read/write for SoundWire devices, ACPI for Rockchip SFC controllers, Atmel SAM7G5 QuadSPI and KEBA SPI controllers, and Blaize BLZP1600 and SpacemiT K1 SoCs.
New support for restartable sequences on OpenRISC, amd-pstate preferred core rankings, SHA512 signing for kernel modules, allocating and freeing “frozen” pages, a new zpdesc memory descriptor, and BPF kfuncs to disable and restore CPU interrupts is also included.
Enhancements to ALSA rawmidi and MIDI 2.0 sequencer APIs have been added, along with a feature to significantly shorten suspend and resume times on some machines and lazy preemption support for PowerPC.
Support for large folios in tmpfs, compress-offload API extensions for ASRC, NFSv4.2+ attribute delegation, dynamic NFSv4.1 session slot resizing, and improved support for Snapdragon X CPUs are also included.
Notable networking improvements feature IPsec support for IP-TFS/AggFrag encapsulation, jumbo packet transmission in RxRPC sockets, and phylib support for in-band capabilities negotiation.
New networking capabilities include configuring header-data-split (HDS) values via ethtool, a structured interface for reporting PHY statistics, support for ipv4-mapped IPv6 clients in smc-r v2, and netlink notifications for multicast IPv4 and IPv6 address changes.
Numerous hardware support enhancements are included, such as a new driver for the SM8750 platform, MT8188 Mali-G57 MC3 support in the Panfrost driver, support for Nacon Evol-X and Pro Compact Xbox One controllers, a new EDAC driver for Loongson SoCs, and Intel Touch host controller support.
Linux 6.14 adds compatibility with the SteelSeries Arctis 9 wireless gaming headset, a new Intel CRPS185 power supply PMBus client driver, optional CPU fan support on AMD 600 motherboards, ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS motherboard support, and 8BitDo controller compatibility.
Additionally, it includes a new cpufreq driver for Airoha SoCs, port filtering support for NVIDIA’s NVLINK-C2C Coresight PMU, Nacon Evol-X and Pro Compact controller support, and support for Marvell Odyssey DDR and LLC-TAD PMUs, along with Allwinner suinv F1C100s compatibility.
Finally, Linux kernel 6.14 introduces support for Awinc AW88083, Realtek ALC5682I-VE sound chips, Focusrite Scarlett 4th Gen interfaces, an unofficial Xbox 360 wireless receiver clone, and updates to Rust for building the kernel using only stable features.
You can download Linux kernel 6.14 from Linus Torvalds’ git tree or the kernel.org website for compilation on your GNU/Linux distribution. However, it’s advisable to wait for this release to be available in your distro’s stable software repositories before updating your kernel.
With Linux kernel 6.14 released, the merge window opens for the next major branch, Linux 6.15, expected by late May or early June 2025. A Release Candidate (RC) development version will be available for public testing on April 6th.
