First Release Candidate for Linux Kernel 6.14 Now Available
Linus Torvalds has officially released the first release candidate for kernel 6.14 and it includes over 500,000 lines of modified code, making for a small release.
The latest Linux kernel now has a release candidate (6.14-rc1) available for testing. Within the 500,000 lines of code, there were over 10,000 commits and 9,300 merges. Although this is one of the smaller releases recently, it still includes some important changes, specifically in the areas of x86 architecture, filesystems, networking, hardware support, and security.
The new release (RC) candidate updates Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) and includes fixes for CPU speculation, enhancements for Secure Encrypted Virtualization, improvements to several filesystems, several networking fixes, support for ARM architecture, and improvements for RISC-V hardware.
Although Torvalds says this is a "tiny" release (because less development occurred over the holidays), he believes the development team was finally able to get the whole holiday season release timing right.
Other changes to the kernel include support for amd-pstate preferred core rankings, a new cgroup controller geared toward device memory, a new AMD XDNA Ryzen AI NPU accelerator driver, support for RISC-V T-Head vector extensions, several Rust updates, improved suspend/resume support for Raspberry Pi, and new or improved drivers for devices like SM8750 platform, MT8188 Mali-G57 MC3 support, a new EDAC driver for Loongson architecture, and more.
Because this release is smaller than usual (and things went well over the holidays), Torvalds is confident kernel 6.14 will be available in March 2025. You can read more about the release here.
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