Marking the second Linux kernel release of 2025, Linux 6.14 has arrived right on time,packed with plenty of upgrades and refinements.
It comes two months after the previous kernel release, following the usual development cycle. Announcing this release, Linus Torvalds added:
So it's early Monday morning (well - early for me, I'm not really a morning person), and I'd love to have some good excuse for why I didn't do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule.
I'd like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed things.
But no. It's just pure incompetence.
Linux Kernel 6.14: What's New?
As a non-LTS release, Linux 6.14 arrives with a shorter support period of around 9–12 weeks, before it reaches its inevitable end-of-life phase. Those looking for long-term use should opt for Linux kernel 6.12 instead.
This kernel release has the following key highlights:
AMD Upgrades
RISC-V Changes
Intel Refinements
Storage Improvements
AMD Upgrades
This kernel release introduces support for AMD Ryzen AI NPU6 by leveraging the newly added AMDXDNA acceleration driver that allows for improved AI workload handling, better power management, and firmware version querying for more reliable hardware compatibility.
On the CPU side of things, there is now enhanced performance for the AES-GCM and AES-XTS encryption standards, with significant gains for both AMD Zen 4 (2% boost) and Zen 5 (3% boost) processors.
Power management also sees many upgrades, with the AMD P-State driver now allowing dynamic preferred core rankings (based on workload) for improving power consumption, while maximizing performance.
Owners of the recently launched AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards will be happy to know that their GPUs are supported with this kernel. When combined with the open source RADV driver that was updated earlier this year, they should have a pretty decent experience on their Linux system.
RISC-V Changes
Support was added for a SpacemiT RISC-V CPU, the Key Stone K1 octa-core SoC featuring SpacemiT X60 cores. This chip was designed for running energy-efficient AI workloads, with a focus on optimizing power usage while running AI tasks.
There is also an important fix for the GhostWrite vulnerability that affected certain RISC-V processors, compromising their memory safety and security. Linux kernel 6.14 addresses the issue by disabling the XTHeadVector instruction set if a vulnerable CPU is detected.
Intel Refinements
The upcoming Intel Panther Lake (and later CPUs) with Xe3 graphics can take advantage of Ultra-High Bit Rate (UHBR) mode via DisplayPort on Thunderbolt's Alt-Mode, allowing two UHBR modes, 10G and 20G.
Similarly, for Panther Lake, another upcoming series of Intel CPUs, there is now support for the thermal driver, enabling thermal management and better power efficiency for these processors.
As for existing Intel products, Arc Alchemist GPUs now behave better with older CPUs from the Alder Lake, Comet Lake, Kaby Lake, Raptor Lake, and Rocket Lake generations, paving the way for lower power consumption.
Storage Improvements
Moving on from the troubles Bcachefs had in the earlier kernel cycle, new changes for it have been successfully included with Linux 6.14. The additions include a disk format change and some other tweaks before Bcachefs loses the “experimental” flag in the near future.
Besides this, there are upgrades to memory management, which include newly added support for uncached buffered I/O, better memory accounting accuracy, and various DAMON refinements.
Miscellaneous Changes
Wrapping up this kernel release, we have a few other notable changes:
Faster suspend/resume functionality for certain devices.
The Copilot key found on new laptops is now interpreted as an F23 key.
Support for 4,096 CPU cores, an increase from the earlier 2,048 CPU core count.
Implementation of VirtualBox guest drivers for ARM64 Linux virtual machines.
A finished NTSYNC driver that opens the door for better performance on Windows games in Linux.
Installing Linux Kernel 6.14
Ubuntu LTS users can try installing the latest mainline Linux kernel manually, but we don't recommend it for new users, or users who don't like to experiment with their daily driver.
On the other hand, rolling release distro users and Fedora users will be among the first ones to get this kernel upgrade on their system. As for the rest, they will have to wait before their distro offers it as part of a new release.
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Abhishek Prakash
