Kernel Watch
Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so that you don’t have to.
L inus Torvalds announced the seventh (and likely final) Release Candidate for what will be Linux 6.14. As we covered during the merge window (period of early development when disruptive changes land), the new kernel includes driver enhancements, particularly for AMD GPUs and AI-related integrated NPUs. It also includes the new ntsync driver to speed up Windows emulation in Wine. In fact, a late breaking development on the latter identified that it was by default only available to the root user, prior to a trivial one-liner patch that changes permissions on the device file used to access it.