14 DAY TRIAL // The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.14.6, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, bringing another round of driver support and other numerous improvements.
Linux kernel 3.14.6 is now the most advanced version of the kernel, at least for a few hours before the final version of the 3.15 branch is out (unless something weird happens and the launch is postponed).
The kernel developers have made quite an effort and this latest updates is one of the biggest so far. It’s still a young kernel and it’s not sure that it will reach the LTS status. There are already a number of long term support builds in existence already, but you can never know.
“I'm announcing the release of the 3.14.6 kernel. All users of the 3.14 kernel series must upgrade.”
“The updated 3.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary,” Greg Kroah-Hartman said in the email announcement.
According to the changelog, the CPU clock rate setting has been fixed (MIPS/loongson2_cpufreq), the correct DMI tag for Dell Inspiron 7520 is now used, the backlight precision when converting from ACPI has been restored, a problem with global suspend on ATI controllers has been fixed, ATPX detection on non-VGA GPUs has been corrected, the interrupt remapping for aliased devices is now working properly, missing TLB page invalidation for hugetlb_cow() has been added, a tuning failure on 32-bit Arch has been fixed, and a segfault in Invensens MPU driver due to null dereference has been repaired.
Also, a number of Dell devices have been added, Intel BayTrail SMBUS has been enabled, a workaround has been implemented for corrupted TEAC UD-H01 feedback data, a KCS timeout that occurred during error recovery has been reset, win8 OSI has been blacklisted for Dell Inspiron 7737, 64-bit builds now work with binutils 2.24, and the LWS-CAS performance has been improved.
If you are using any of the versions released until now in the Linux kernel 3.13.x branch, you should consider an update to this build, although you have to consider the fact that the 3.15 branch is almost out and that it might be advisable to get that one instead.
Linux kernel 3.14 features, among other things, better Intel Broadwell graphics support, various Radeon improvements, Nouveau improvements (support for new GPUs from NVIDIA), quite a few Btrfs changes, and even NVIDIA Tegra PRIME support.
A complete list of commits in this branch of the kernel can be found in the official announcement. You can download Linux kernel 3.14.6 right now from Softpedia.