As anticipated the Linux 6.13 kernel was promoted to stable today with an on-time release and in turn also marking the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window. Linux 6.13 stable has plenty of fine features for this first major kernel release of 2025.
Linux 6.13 comes with the introduction of the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for benefiting multi-CCD Ryzen X3D processors, the new AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” server processors will now default to AMD P-State rather than ACPI CPUFreq for better power efficiency, the start of Intel Xe3 graphics bring-up, support for many older (pre-M1) Apple devices like numerous iPads and iPhones, NVMe 2.1 specification support, and AutoFDO and Propeller optimization support when compiling the Linux kernel with the LLVM Clang compiler. Linux 6.13 also brings more Rust programming language infrastructure and more. See our Linux 6.13 feature overview for a more comprehensive look at the many changes to find with this new kernel version.
As for the changes merged in the past week since Linux 6.13-rc7, there was the disabling of the EXECMEM_ROX support on x86_64 that caused a stir for that Microsoft-contributed code during the v6.13 merge window. Merged today was also a fix for EEVDF scheduling lag among a number of other last-minute patches hitting the Linux Git tree this past week.
Now it’s onward to the Linux 6.14 development cycle that is sure to be very exciting.
