Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window wrapped up this past weekend with the release of Linux 6.14-rc1, here is a recap of all the great new features, hardware enablement, and other improvements to find with this kernel.
Linux 6.14 is now going through its release candidate phase while the stable v6.14 kernel will be out in March. Linux 6.14 is towing a lot of new features with the introduction of the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPUs, the NTSYNC driver is ready to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives, other new AMD drivers, uncached buffered I/O support, more preparations for AMD RDNA4 GPUs, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite support, IO_uring FUSE handling, more preparations for Intel Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest hardware, more Rust programming language support for kernel drivers, and dozens of other exciting changes.
Based on my monitoring of the Linux 6.14 merge requests and the code that landed into the kernel, here is a recap of all the exciting Linux 6.14 changes.
Processors:
– RISC-V is now mitigated for the GhostWrite vulnerability.
– TLB Flushing Scalability Optimizations were merged for helping AMD and Intel CPUs.
– Various Linux x86 KVM enhancements.
– 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 the SpacemiT K1 RISC-V SoC.
– Many AMD P-State driver changes.
– Faster AES-GCM and AES-XTS crypto for AMD CPUs.
– A new “AMD Node” driver option for splitting away from legacy AMD Northbridge code.
– Various other new AMD CPU features.
– Better handling for AMD Preferred Core.
– Ongoing improvements to the Intel TDX code for Trust Domain Extensions with confidential compute VMs.
– The Turbostat tool is now ready for Intel Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest CPUs.
– Intel thermal driver preparations for Panther Lake.
– EDAC driver preparations for Intel Clearwater Forest.
– A LoongArch CPU + ECC memory EDAC driver was merged.
– Resource Control for total memory bandwidth monitoring.
– Perf support for up to 2,048 CPU cores.
Linux On Laptops:
– Support for the Microsoft Copilot Key found on some newer laptop models like from Lenovo.
– Much faster suspend and resume support for some systems.
– A lot of AMD x86 platform driver updates.
– Intel THC drivers were merged for the Touch Host Controller IP.
Linux Gaming:
– The NTSYNC driver is now considered completed for better emulating Windows NT synchronization primitives on Linux. NTSYNC can be used moving forward with Wine / Steam Play (Proton) once the user-space patches land for allowing better Windows gaming performance with some titles.
– More game controllers supported by the XPad driver.
– Support for the SteelSeries Arctis 9 headset.
GPUs / Graphics:
– The AMDXDNA driver was merged for that Ryzen AI NPU hardware support living under the DRM subsystem’s “accel” area. AMDXDNA provides all the needed kernel bits for supporting the AMD Ryzen AI NPUs on the mainline Linux kernel.
– a new “DMEM” cgroup for device memory like GPUs and other hardware with local memory attached. This can be used if wanting to limit GPU vRAM use to a control group.
– Thunderbolt UHBR rate support for upcoming Panther Lake Xe3 graphics. There is also other ongoing Xe kernel driver enablement work for the Panther Lake / Xe3 integrated graphics support.
– The AMDGPU driver now has DRM Panic support for the Linux “Blue Screen of Death” screen.
– AMD cleaner shader support for more GPUs.
– More AMD RDNA4 preparations for the upcoming Radeon RX 90×0 series graphics cards.
– The new DRM boot logger for kernel messages.
