Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.14-rc1 to cap off the Linux 6.14 merge window.
In the next day or two I’ll publish my Linux 6.14 kernel feature overview to sum up the many individual articles on Phoronix over the past two weeks that cover all the interesting Linux 6.14 highlights. Some of the Linux 6.14 changes that immediately stand out are many enhancements to the Rust infrastructure in making it more applicable for hosting Rust-written hardware drivers, the NTSYNC driver is now complete for better emulating Windows NT synchronization primitives to better handle Wine / Proton (Steam Play) Windows gaming on Linux, the AMDXDNA driver was merged for enabling Ryzen AI NPUs, Bcachefs file-system enhancements, more AMD RDNA4 graphics preparations, Intel THC was merged, uncached buffered I/O is an exciting optimization finally in mainline, support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC, faster AMD CPU crypto performance, new AMD CPU features, and many scheduler improvements. Again, stay tuned for the lengthy Linux 6.14 feature list soon on Phoronix.
Linus Torvalds wrote about Linux 6.14-rc1 in the release announcement:
“This is actually a _tiny_ merge window, and that’s ok. The holidays clearly meant that people did less development than during a normal cycle, and that then shows up as a much smaller-than-average release. I really felt like this year we got the whole holiday season release timing right, and this is just another sign of that.
Of course, “tiny” for us still means that there’s half a million lines changed, and more than 10k commits in there – but only barely. In fact, not counting merges there’s only something like 9.3k commits. Sothe shortlog is still much too large to post – it’s really “tiny” only when compared to our normal releases.
Aside from the size, the stats otherwise look fairly normal: pretty much exactly half of the diff is drivers, with the rest being a pretty normal mix of arch updates, filesystem code, tooling and documentation. And all the usual changes spread all over.
Let’s hope that a small release also ends up meaning smooth sailing during the stabilization phase. That’s obviously guaranteed, but fingers crossed…”
When running CLOC on the Linux Git source tree this morning, it measures in at around 37.7 million lines with some 28.46 million lines of detected code, another 4.5 million lines of comments, and around 4.75 million blank lines. The Linux source tree for Linux 6.14-rc1 measures in at around 76.9k files.
Now onward to Linux 6.14 kernel benchmarking and performance tests.
