According to Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux), kernel 6.14 is “tiny.” He also said this: “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. So the shortlog is still much too large to post – it’s really ‘tiny’ only when compared to our normal releases.”
Half a million lines of code changed is not insignificant. Although it might be small in new features, Linux kernel 6.14 does deliver some significant changes. For instance, the new kernel includes updates for RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability), fixes for CPU speculation, Secure Encrypted Virtualization, and microcode loader improvements.
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For the lower levels, there are improvements for filesystems, networking, hardware support, and security. Concerning hardware support, there are updates for SoC ARM and RISC-V, improvements to Btrfs, XFS, GFS2, F2FS, and NTFS3 file systems, enhancements to the Berkely Packet Filter, support for AMD pstate preferred core rankings, a new cgroup controller for system memory, a new accelerator for AMD XDRNA Ryzen AI NPUs, support for SELinux extended permissions, and more.
Another key improvement is a new addition that will reduce the time between suspend and resume on some systems.
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Nearly half of the changes added to 6.14-rc1 are driver-related, with the rest being arch updates, filesystem code, tooling, and documentation.
Note that this release is 6.14-rc1. That “rc” is important as it denotes a release candidate, which means it’s not ready for prime time. Although you can download the source for the RC candidate, unless you’re testing, it’s not advisable to install a release candidate kernel on a machine you use daily.
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The projected release date for Linux kernel 6.14 is late March 2025; expect it to start hitting distribution repositories after that date. Since this is a rather small release, Torvalds expects the release should be smooth sailing.
