Linux 6.14 release - Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architecture

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.14 on LKML:

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.

So yes, a little delayed for no good reason at all, and obviously that means that the merge window has opened. No rest for the wicked (or the incompetent).

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.

Judging by my pending pile of pull requests, 6.15 will be much busier.

Linus

Released about two months ago, Linux 6.13 added lazy preemption, support for atomic writes, various other improvements in BTRFS, F2FS, and EXT4 file systems, the removal of ReiserFS, build system optimizations such as AutoFDO (automatic feedback-directed optimization) and Propeller, and more.

Newsworthy changes in Linux 6.14

Some notable improvements in Linux 6.14 include:

Better Wine performance with NT synchronization (NTSYNC) primitive driver – The Windows NT operating systems offer some synchronization primitives that are different to the ones present on Unix systems. This creates performance problems when trying to emulate this behavior for software like Wine. This release adds a driver that allows to model NT’s primitives and spend less time trying to emulate it, which can improve performance massively in some programs, especially games. Read more on LWN.
FUSE support for io_uring-based communication – Linux 6.14 adds FUSE support for io-uring communication between kernel and userspace in order to increase FUSE performance by reducing context switches and other techniques. Check out the documentation for details.
amdxdna driver for AMD NPUs – NPUs in x86 SoCs are pretty new, and support has been spotty in Linux (and even Windows) so far. The latest Linux release added the amdxdna driver for AMD NPUs (Neural Processing Units) based on the AMD XDNA architecture to accelerate CNNs, LLMs, and other AI workloads.
uncached buffered I/O – This adds support for optionally sending buffered I/O whose pages will be dropped from the page cache once the data is read/written. Fast storage devices can fill the RAM with too much page cache that will not be needed, and this feature makes it possible to read/write data and drop it from the cache without facing the disadvantages and complexity of dealing with Direct I/O. See LWN article for more details.
Small change to enable the Microsoft CoPilot key on some new laptops from Lenovo, HP, and Dell

Arm updates in Linux 6.14

As usual, there were plenty of changes for the Arm architecture:

Allwinner
- Allwinner F1C100s – Added DMA support, ASoC driver
- ASoC – Add 24-bit support to S/PDIF. Tested on H3, A64, H6 and H313 SoCs up to 192KHz.
- DTS changes
  - Enable audio codec on Lichee Pi Nano
  - Add syscon and SRAM nodes for A100
  - Enable CPU DVFS for Tanix TX1
  - Explicitly configure TCON0 pixel clock parent according to display output used
- New Devices – N/A

Rockchip
- PHY driver
  - Added Rockchip RK3576 combo phy support
  - Rockchip pcie phy mutex and regmap update
- PCIe controller driver
  - Simplify clock and reset handling by using bulk interfaces
  - Pass typed rockchip_pcie (not void) pointer to rockchip_pcie_disable_clocks()
  - Return -ENOMEM, not success, when pci_epc_mem_alloc_addr() fails
- Rockchip DesignWare PCIe controller driver
  - Use dll_link_up IRQ to detect Link Up and enumerate devices so users don’t have to manually rescan
  - Tell DWC core not to wait for link up since the ‘sys’ interrupt is required and detects Link Up events
- Pinctrl – New subdriver for the Rockchip RK3562 SoC
- IOMMU – Add DT bindings for Rockchip RK3576
- SPI – ACPI support and improved power management for Rockchip SFC controllers
- New devices
  - Radxa E52C SBC (RK3582)
  - BigTreeTech CB2 module and Pi2 SBC (RK3566)
  - H96 Max V58 TV Box (RK3588)
  - Rockchip RK3576 EVB1 board
  - Firefly ITX-3588J (Core-3588J SoM)
  - Orange Pi 5 Max
Amlogic
- Drivers change – Document the System Control registers found on early Meson SoC
- DT bindings – Convert the Amlogic Meson6, Meson8 and Meson8b SDIO/MMC controller bindings to dt-schema.
- ARM64 DT changes for Linux 6.14 – Remove Broadcom wifi compatible from GX reference boards
- New devices – N/A
Samsung
- Added Samsung Exynos 9810
- Pinctrl driver – Two fixes for very old issues around error handling and also one cleanup.
- Clock – Samsung Exynos 990 SoC clk driver
- SoC drivers
  - Add new bindings for sysreg in Exynos 8895.
  - Minor improvements in Exynos USI bindings.
  - Fix for Smatch warning in Exynos PMU syscon driver.
- Samsung DTS ARM64 changes
  - Exynos 8895 – Add UART nodes, PMU (performance) for the M2 cluster and I2C controllers in the camera block (HSI2C in CAM0-3).
  - Exynos 990 – Add Power Management Unit (Samsung block), PMU (performance) for M5 cluster and two clock controllers.
  - Exynos Auto v920 – Add watchdog and DMA controllers.
  - Google GS101 – Minor fixes for phy and USB. Add USB Type-C.
  - Exynos850-e850-96 board: Drop gap in memory layout.
- DTS ARM changes – Few fixes and improvements for sound on Galaxy Tab3 (Exynos 4212)
- Defconfig changes – N/A
- New Devices (all smartphones)
  - Exynos 9810 – Samsung Galaxy S9 (SM-G960F)
  - Exynos 990
    - Samsung Galaxy S20 FE (SM-G780F)
    - Samsung Galaxy S20 5G (SM-G980F)
Qualcomm
- New SoCs
  - Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite (SM8750) for premium smartphones
  - Qualcomm Snapdragon AR2 (SAR2130P) for augmented reality glasses.
  - Qualcomm IQ6 (QCS610) and IQ8 (QCS8300) industrial “DragonWing” IoT platforms.
  - Snapdragon 425 (MSM8917) mobile phone SoC (launched in 2016)
  - Qualcomm IPQ5424 Wi-Fi 7 networking chip (some drivers for it were already added in Linux 6.3)
- Clock
  - Qualcomm clk controllers: IPQ CMN PLL, SM6115 LPASS, SM750 global, tcsr, rpmh, and display. X Plus GPU and global. QCS615 rpmh and MSM8937 and MSM8940 RPM.
  - Qualcomm Pongo and Taycan Alpha PLLs
  - Qualcomm IPQ5424 NoC-related interconnect clks
- PHY – Added Qualcomm SAR2130P qmp usb, SAR2130P qmp pcie, QCS615 qusb2 and PCIe, IPQ5424 qmp pcie, IPQ5424 QUSB2 and USB3 PH
- DMA – Added Qualcomm QCS615, QCS8300, SM8750, SA8775P GPI dma controller support
- PCIe controller driver
  - Add DT SM8550 and SM8650 optional ‘global’ interrupt for link events
  - Add DT ‘compatible’ strings for IPQ5424 PCIe controller
  - If ‘global’ IRQ is supported for detection of Link Up events, tell DWC core not to wait for link up
- Pinctrl
  - New subdriver for the Qualcomm MSM8917 SoC TLMM
  - Fix some missing pins in the Qualcomm IPQ5424 TLMM
- IOMMU – SMMUv2:
  - Implement per-client prefetcher configuration on Qualcomm SoCs
  - Support for the Adreno SMMU on Qualcomm’s SDM670 SOC
- WiFi
  - ath10k – Support for the QCA6698AQ IP core
  - ath12k – Enable MLO for QCN9274
- Driver updates
  - SCM drivers – Number of fixes and improvements related to race conditions during initialization. QSEECOM and the EFI variable service therein is enabled for a few 8cx Gen 3 and X Elite boards.
  - LLCC driver – Configuration for IPQ5424 and WRCACHE is enabled on X Elite.
  - The BCM_TCS_CMD() macro is corrected and is cleaned up.
  - Support for SM7225 and X 1 Plus are added to the pd-mapper.
  - pmic_glink and the associated altmode driver are simplied using guards.
  - socinfo is added for QCS9075 and serial number readout on MSM8916 devices is corrected.
- ARM32 DTS updates
  - Describe the interconnect paths for PCIe EP controllers on SDX55 and SDX65.
  - Disable USB U1/U2 entry to improve USB stability.
- Arm64 DTS updates for Linux 6.14
  - IPQ9574 – Gains PCIe and TRNG descriptions, together with a few other smaller improvements.
  - IPQ5332 – TRNG is enabled
  - MSM8994 – Huawei Nexus 6P gains power and volume keys support. USB interrupts are corrected.
  - QCM6490 – The FairPhone 5 gains camera EEPROM and Rb3 Gen2 development kit gains a description of the onboard LEDs.
  - QRB4210 RB2 – Support for HDMI audio playback is added.
  - SA8775P – Gains missing clock controllers, CPUs are tied to PSCI power domains, DisplayPort is introduced and enabled on the Ride board.
  - SDM670 – The GPU components are described and enabled for Google Pixel 3a, together with the camera clock controller and flash LED.
  - SM8250 – Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro gets WiFi and Bluetooth enabled.
  - SM8550 and SM8650, – “global” IRQ for PCIe RC controllers are described to allow for hotplug events.
  - Snapdragon X Elite – Gains QUP power domains and OPPs, another PCIe controller, another UART, and its SDHCI controllers. The ASUS Vivobook S 15 gets GPU and lid switch enabled. Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 gains audio configuration, SD card reader support, and USB retimers. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x gets its LID switch described. Dell XPS 13 gains retimers described. The Lenovo Thinkpad T14s has additional USB ports enabled, as well as sound and fingerprint sensor.
  - Coresight support is added for SM8450, SM8650, X 1 Elite, QCS615, and QCS8300.
  - USB U1/U2 entry is disabled across a variety of platforms, to improve USB stability.
  - Sleep clock frequencies are reviewed and corrected for various platforms, as are various remoteproc mmio address ranges.

- Arm64 defconfig updates for Linux 6.14
  - Enable core drivers for SM8750, QCS8300, SA8775P, and QCS615.
  - Enable the IPQ CMD PLL driver. Drop the 8650 display clock option, now that the driver has been consolidated with 8550.
- New devices
  - MTP and QRD boards for the Snapdragon 8 Elite platform
  - Ride board for the QCS615 platform
  - Ride board for the QCS8300 platform
  - RDP466 board (IPQ5424),
  - Xiaomi Redmi 5A (MSM8917)
  - Snapdragon AR2 Gen1 Smart Viewer Development Kit
  - HP Omnibook X laptop and the Snapdragon Devkit (Snapdragon X Elite)
  - Huawei Matebook E Go and Microsoft Windows Dev Kit 2023 (Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3)
MediaTek
- Pinctrl – New subdriver for the Mediatek MT7988 SoC
- PCIe Gen3 controller driver
  - Use clk_bulk_prepare_enable() instead of separate clk_bulk_prepare() and clk_bulk_enable()
  - Rearrange reset assert/deassert so they’re both done in the *_power_up() callbacks
  - Document that Airoha EN7581 requires PHY init and power-on before PHY reset deassert, unlike other MediaTek Gen3 controllers
  - Move Airoha EN7581 post-reset delay from the en7581 clock .enable() method to mtk_pcie_en7581_power_up()
  - Sleep instead of delay during Airoha EN7581 power-up, since this is a non-atomic context
  - Skip PERST# assertion on Airoha EN7581 during probe and suspend/resume to avoid a hardware defect
  - Enable async probe to reduce system startup time
- Driver updates for Linux 6.14 – Fixes avoiding iomap leaks on error paths in the MediaTek devapc driver.
- MediaTek WiFi (mt76)
  - Single wiphy multiband support (preparation for MLO)
  - p2p device support
  - Add TP-Link TXE50UH USB adapter support
- Defconfig updates
  - Enable building modules for the integrated Ethernet controllers (MediaTek STAR and MediaTek DWMAC Glue layer) found on various MediaTek SoCs
  - Enable building modules for the sound card on MT8188 and DSP on MT8186.
- ARM32 DTS updates – N/A
- ARM64 Devicetree updates
  - Fixes and improvements:
    - MT8516 gets a few fixes for GICv2, Watchdog and I2C, and support for the Keypad controller;
    - MT8390 Genio 700 board gets basic audio support;
    - MT8365 gets an alias for its integrated ethernet controller;
    - MT8195 gets an important fix for system suspend: all of the machines based on this SoC and its IoT variant can now properly perform PM Suspend to RAM;
    - MT8188 gets support for its Mali GPU with DVFS and a fix for the OVL Hardware found in the Display Controller using the right compatible strings;
    - MT8186 Chromebooks can now suspend properly thanks to a fix moving the USB wakeups from XHCI to MTU3 (USB) controller;
    - MT8183 Chromebooks get a fix for their DMIC microphone and proper support for their second-source touchscreen;
    - MT7988 SoC and the BananaPi R4 board gets support for Pinctrl, eMMC/SD, Thermal, CPU DVFS, PCI-Express, and peripherals like the RT5190A PMIC, PCA9545 I2C mux, and others;
    - MT7986 BananaPi R3 board gets support for SATA power socket;
  - Cleanups:
    - Dropped regulator-compatible property from MediaTek DTs;
    - Aligned thermal node names with bindings on MT8183 Kukui;
    - MT6397 PMIC get proper sub-node names, fixing dt validation;
    - The property enabling the Wake-On-Lan feature changed in all of the boards and driver to match the actual meaning of it (mediatek,mac-wol now enables wol on mac instead of phy);
    - Compatibles for MediaTek PMIC Keypad are added to bindings and can now pass DTS validation;
- New devices
  - Lenovo Chromebook Duet based on MT8188 (Ciri)
  - ASUS Chromebook Enterprise CM30 based on MT8186 (Starmie)
  - ASUS Chromebook CZ12 and CZ12 Flip based on MT8186 (Chinchou)
Other new Arm hardware platforms and SoCs
- Aspeed
  - IBM SPB1 AST2600 BMC machine (Sapphire Rapids x86 server)
  - Ampere Mt Jefferson AST2600 BMC
- Blaize – Blaize BLZP1600 AI chip using custom GSP (Graph Streaming Processor) cores for computation and two small Cortex-A53 cores that run the operating system.
- Microchip – SAMA7D65 32-bit embedded chip with a single Cortex-A7 core
- Renesas
  - R-Car V4H ES3.0 (R8A779G3), an updated version of the V4H (R8A779G0) low-power automotive SoC
  - RZ/G3E (R0A09G047) embedded chips using Cortex-A55 cores
Raspberry Pi-related changes
- Added Display pipeline DT nodes on BCM2712 (Raspberry Pi 5)
- Enable the TRB overfetch quirk on VIA VL805
- Enables the pinctrl-based I2C mux driver which is used on Raspberry Pi 4-based systems since the switch to Device Tree files to use the i2c mux representation
- bcm2835-unicam: Disable trigger mode operation – This eliminate the corruption (missing line or invalid samples within the line) on imx219/imx708 sensors when the sensor first starts. This only impacts the upstream Unicam kernel driver.

RISC-V changes

The RISC-V architecture had a few changes in Linux 6.14:

A redundant AQRL barrier has been removed from the futex cmpxchg implementation
Some more page table information is now printed on die() and systems that cause PA overflows
Alibaba T-Head
- TH1520 pinctrl and dwmac drivers are enabled in defconfig
- Support for the T-Head vector extensions, which includes exposing these extensions to userspace on systems that implement them
- Add mailbox node for the T-Head TH1520 in device tree
Microchip
- PCIe – Allow dma-noncoherent. PolarFire SoC may be configured in a way that requires non-coherent DMA handling. On RISC-V, buses are coherent by default & the dma-noncoherent property is required to denote buses or devices that are non-coherent.
SpacemIT
- Added SpacemiT K1
- Pinctrl – Enable the Spacemit pin controller by default in the SoC config. The SoC will not boot without it so this one is pretty much required
StarFive – Device Tree: Milk-V Mars and Pine64 Star64 boards get their usb0 interfaces moved from peripheral to host mode.
New board – Banana Pi BPI-F3

MIPS architecture

For Linux 6.14, the summary of changes is just “Cleanups and fixes”. Here’s the full list for reference:

MIPS: pci-legacy: Override pci_address_to_pio
MIPS: Loongson64: env: Use str_on_off() helper in prom_lefi_init_env()
MIPS: migrate to generic rule for built-in DTBs
mips: fix shmctl/semctl/msgctl syscall for o32
mips/math-emu: fix emulation of the prefx instruction
MIPS: Loongson: Add comments for interface_info
MIPS: Loongson64: remove ROM Size unit in boardinfo
MIPS: traps: Use str_enabled_disabled() in parity_protection_init()
MIPS: ftrace: Declare ftrace_get_parent_ra_addr() as static
Revert “MIPS: csrc-r4k: Select HAVE_UNSTABLE_SCHED_CLOCK if SMP && 64BIT”
MIPS: Fix the wrong format specifier
MIPS: Add a blank line after __HEAD
MIPS: kernel: Rename read/write_c0_ecc to read/writec0_errctl

I’ve also generated the full Linux 6.14 changelog with commit messages only using the command git log v6.13..v6.14-rc7 --stat. You can also check out a detailed Linux 6.14 Changelog on Kernelnewbies.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.