Linux 6.14 Features Include The AMDXDNA Ryzen AI Driver, NTSYNC, Uncached Buffered I/O & Much More
Storage / File-Systems:
- Bcachefs file-system driver improvements in working toward removing the "experimental" flag on this copy-on-write file-system.
- Uncached Buffered I/O support was merged.
- IO_uring with FUSE for better FUSE file-system performance.
- NFS gained Direct I/O with LOCALIO and attribute delegation support.
- F2FS converted more I/O paths to using folios.
- Reduced SquashFS memory use.
- Better read performance for CIFS.
- Improved real-time device support with XFS.
- A performance benefit from caching symlink lengths within inodes.
- Btrfs gains a RAID1 round-robin option.
- STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN for addressing a performance pitfall.
- A new mountinfo tool is bundled with the Linux kernel source tree and for demonstrating the kernel's statmount() and listmount() interfaces.
- NVMe PCI endpoint function target driver was merged for nifty use-cases.
Other Hardware:
- The NVIDIA VFIO driver is preparing for Blackwell.
- SoundWire Multi-Lane support for using multiple data lanes when needing great bandwidth for SoundWire audio devices.
- CXL preparations around Type 2 and CXL 3.1 devices.
- Intel contributed an AltMode Thunderbolt 3 driver along with other USB/Thunderbolt improvements.
- Working hardware sensor monitoring for more desktop motherboards.
- Various new sound chipsets supported as well as the Focusrite Scarlett 4th Gen 16i16, 18i16, and 18i20 digital audio USB interfaces.
- ROCEv2 support for the Alibaba CLoud ERDMA driver.
- FPGA support for AAEON UP maker boards.
- Many wired and wireless networking driver improvements.
Rust For Linux:
- The gendwarfksyms tool has been merged to help with the Rust efforts.
- Another major milestone for the Rust code.
- Almost at the stage of being able to write real Rust drivers now that more of the PCI and platform device driver abstractions are in place for Rust.
Other Improvements:
- Dropping EFI's long obsolete UGA protocol support.
- KUnit will now default to using hardware acceleration for faster testing.
- Easier debugging of early boot issues.
- VirtualBox guest support for ARM64 VMs.
- Many scheduler improvements throughout.
- Support for adjusting the "pid_max" value on a per PID namespace basis to help out older software in particular.
- Faster /proc/kcore reads for Drgn debugging.
Linux Security:
- User address masking now uses the CMOV instruction.
- The Landlock LSM can now deal with "weird" files.
- Switching from SHA1 to SHA512 module signing by default to match what is already done by a number of Linux distribution vendor kernels.
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