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It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who can blow a deadline. Linux Torvalds confessed that he’d love to have had “some good excuse for why I didn’t do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule. … 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.”
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Despite the minor delay, Linux 6.14 arrives packed with cutting-edge features and improvements to power upcoming Linux distributions, such as the forthcoming Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42.
The big news for desktop users is the improved NTSYNC driver, especially those who like to play Windows games or run Windows programs on Linux. This driver is designed to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives. What that feature means for you and me is that it will significantly improve the performance of Windows programs running on Wine and Steam Play.
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Linux gamers are eagerly awaiting this release. YouTube Linux video host Gardiner Bryant proclaimed, “NTSYNC will change Linux gaming forever.” On Reddit, one poster said, “NTsync hits all points. It’s fast, portable, robust, and correct. The correctness comes from just straight up implementing Windows style synchronization semantics in a kernel module rather than trying to jury-rig or iterate on the futex/futex2 interface.”
Gamers always want the best possible graphics performance, so they’ll also be happy to see that Linux now supports recently launched AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards. This approach includes support for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. Combine this support with the recently improved open-source RADV driver and AMD gamers should see the best speed yet on their gaming rigs.
Of course, the release is not just for gamers. Linux 6.14 also includes several AMD and Intel processor enhancements. These boosts focus on power management, thermal control, and compute performance optimizations. These updates are expected to improve overall system efficiency and performance.
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6 Comments
mouse_
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?
TheCleric
Relatable
jmclnx
>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.
andy_xor_andrew
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?
DominoTree
"Linux Torvalds"
kwar13
zdnet… now that's a familiar name I haven't seen in a while