Linux kernel 6.14 is a big leap forward in performance and Windows compatibility

CrankyBear | 191 points

    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.
    
    Because absolutely nothing last-minute happened yesterday, and I was just clearing up some unrelated things in order to be ready for the merge window. And in the process just entirely forgot to actually ever cut the release. D'oh.
Relatable
TheCleric | 25 days ago

From a YouTube comment:

> please don't hype NTSYNC. yes it has better compatibility than ESYNC and FSYNC, yes it's marginally faster in selected title. The phoronix article reports benchmarks with WINESYNC vs NTSYNC, the gains are there only if you were not already running FSYNC (on by default in most titles running under proton).

> By overhyping features they ultimately end up underdelivering because people expect insane gains that were never there to begin with.

Surely we can do better than YouTube comments?

mouse_ | 25 days ago

I'm super excited for this! But it makes me curious.

What's the process like for getting such a low-level primitive added to Linux? Especially a low-level primitive that 1) exist basically just to emulate behavior of a completely different kernel, and 2) is only needed for a subset of users to play games?

I'm not complaining, just curious. I would assume a patch to add the above would be heavily scrutinized. Is it because the popularity of the Steam Deck / proton?

andy_xor_andrew | 25 days ago

Sometime around 2020-2021 I stopped checking if a video game will work in Linux. These days almost everything does with minimal friction. DXVK and Vulkan have been gamechangers.

buyucu | 25 days ago

If you’re wondering about hard numbers, the benefits for Wine look massive.

From Jan 2024:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Windows-NT-Sync-RFC-Linux

cadamsdotcom | 25 days ago

I also believe this kernel adds Intel GPU support for the N100 and N150 chips used in lots of mini PCs. I have a Beelink N150 rig running various Docker containers that I am curious to test some light AI workloads on.

nodesocket | 25 days ago

I wonder if he reads every single line of code. Or even skims over them.

ptdorf | 25 days ago

> Below is the shortlog for the last week. It's nice and small - not only was there no last-minute issue yesterday, the whole last week was pretty calm. The patch is dominated by some amd gpu updates, and even those are pretty small. The rest is random small changes all over.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wg7TO09Si5tTPyhdrLLvyYtVm...

Funny that Linus himself doesn't consider much in the release noteworthy besides the GPU stuff, yet the submission article goes on about "leaps", "big news" and "major step".

diggan | 25 days ago

Not a single word about missing bcachefs fixes? Or are they now in?

Or the upcoming breaking GPIO changes. That will be a huge minefield

rurban | 25 days ago

zdnet... now that's a familiar name I haven't seen in a while

kwar13 | 25 days ago

"Linux Torvalds"

DominoTree | 25 days ago

tl;dr: better windows-like filesystem driver for Wine, better AMD GPU drivers, more Rust implementations, support for Snapdragon 8 Elite, fixed vulnerabilities on RISC-V, better btrfs

Jotalea | 25 days ago

>This driver is designed to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives

To me, anything that emulates windows primitives is a bad thing. Again these changes being pushed by Microsoft make me glad the BSDs exist.

Lets hope the BSDs can continue staying independent of Large Corporations.

jmclnx | 25 days ago