15 ms·

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

191 points by CrankyBear 2y ago

mouse_ 2y 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?
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  YouTube comments have lots of smart people in them, sometimes.
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago
    That can be simplified by the topic and presentation. Is the content trying to educate, be entertaining or both. Is the topic extremely niche then you will find like minded people with suggestions and discussions.
- mhurron 2y ago
  If you've been anywhere around linux gaming circles for the past 6-8ish months, you've seen nothing but people not understanding the benchmarks hype NTSYNC. Everyone trying to set appropriate expectations is pretty quickly silenced in whatever manner the platform allows (downvote, etc)
  - shmerl 2y ago
    Must be some wrong circles. From what I've seen, it's mostly well known that ntsync is comparable to existing solutions like esync / fsync.
- shmerl 2y ago
  Hype is not about better performance but about upstream support. It's valuable.
- nialv7 2y ago
  One exciting aspect of NTSYNC is that it could get into wine upstream. FSYNC is only available in Proton and not in upstream wine, mainly because it is not fully conformant, i.e. it doesn't behave exactly like its Windows counterpart does. But NTSYNC doesn't have this problem.
- Adverblessly 2y ago
  That is a question of source. If you read the article on GoL instead ( https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/03/linux-kernel-6-14-out-late-due-to-pure-incompetence-dont-get-too-excited-about-linux-gaming-boosts/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/03/linux-kernel-6-14-out-... ) you would have already read that: > For Valve's Proton however, don't go expecting much here with ntsync. As Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais replied to a user on Bluesky to note: > We already include fsync, which should be as fast or faster as ntsync. We developed ntsync as a general solution that'd be acceptable in upstream Wine, but there's no urgency in including it in the Deck / SteamOS kernel.
  - tremon 2y ago
    That's odd. Why would wine not accept improvements using fsync from Proton?
    - resoluteteeth 2y ago
      https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50281#c6 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50281#c6
TheCleric 2y ago
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
- cube00 2y ago
  > But no. It's just pure incompetence. While I don't agree with how he conducts himself on the mailing lists; I respect he uses the same language when talking about himself.
  - ASalazarMX 2y ago
    Does he willingly take that treatment from others? I don't really know, but that would be the actual test of congruence.
    - SEGyges 2y ago
      I am not deep into the Linus weeds but my impression is that he doesn't especially care if he's on the receiving end of this. It only started to feel different from "well, the Linux list is the PvP zone" when Linus was sufficiently weighty/famous that you almost had to take an insult from him to heart, and he did eventually correct his behavior there.
      - ASalazarMX 2y ago
        I'm also not that of a fan to know that many details, but I'd place my bets in that he actually doesn't care if people speak to him the same way, as long as they have solid arguments. I think Linus is overall one of the goods influences in this strange IT period.
    - 2y ago
jmclnx 2y 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.
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  Windows did the same thing, in Windows Vista they added some Linux style synchronization primitives, for example condition variables.
- devmor 2y ago
  Is initcall_blacklist not enough of an option for you?
  - jmclnx 2y ago
    I am still on 5.15, I will need to remember to blacklist it. But that does not address the fact Microsoft is slowly taking control of Linux.
    - devmor 2y ago
      In what way do you view this as Microsoft taking control of Linux? This is an effort to support more users leaving Microsoft for Linux and taking their software with them.
- Inityx 2y ago
  Well, one of the biggest drivers of consumer Linux adoption in recent years has been the Steam Deck, and compatibility with Steam games. The article explicitly calls out how this improves performance for this use case. I think your opinion is an unpopular one.
  - tdb7893 2y ago
    Yeah, I know multiple people running Linux at home and Windows compatibility us a critical feature for them. For the people I know not in tech about half would switch if Linux got up to par in: 1. Ability to play any video game 2. Compatibility with hardware (e.g. one of my friends is booting windows temporarily as his graphics card has an issue on Linux) 3. Usability/looks. This is subjective but for people used to Windows for the last couple decades people often find Linux more difficult to use and honestly uglier (Linux is customizable but most people I know are not confident enough to go far from the defaults). This is just my friends, some of whom are engineers and some are normal people when it comes to technical ability, but currently a lot of them want to like Linux but have specific requirements holding them back.
andy_xor_andrew 2y 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?
- dayjah 2y ago
  I don’t know if this answers your question directly: but the article points out that this is a module, not a primitive that’s in the kernel itself. The idea here is that wine/proton can interact with this module directly if it’s loaded, or continue to use their wrappers around existing fsync if not. I expect that means a little less scrutiny since if it segs the user can choose to not load it and achieve a stable OS.
- nialv7 2y ago
  Technically this is not a low-level primitive. NTSYNC isn't added as a, say, system call like futex2[0] was. It's instead added as a character devivce - which you can build your kernel without, and functions via ioctls. [0]: https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/futex2.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/futex2.html
- no-js-user 2y ago
  You've got a nice arc river in "of / getting / to". Easier to find if you look slightly away from that part of the text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)
DominoTree 2y ago
"Linux Torvalds"
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  The genious and madman behind the Linus Operating System.
- genpfault 2y ago
  "...a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, ..."[1] [1]: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/security/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbons-isyoursonacomputerhacker.html https://gwern.net/doc/cs/security/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbon...
- wyldfire 2y ago
  Gell-Mann amnesia [1] is an interesting thing to think about here. But IMO the real problem is that editing for most journalism websites is done very very poorly, if at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
kwar13 2y ago
zdnet... now that's a familiar name I haven't seen in a while
nodesocket 2y 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.
- jaimehrubiks 2y ago
  What would be the meaning of that? I have a Beelink with N100 for more than a year and HW acceleration works already (I use it in Jellyfin), so I wonder what do you mean that "intel gpu support" would mean.
  - nodesocket 2y ago
    What OS are you running? I’m running Debian 12 Stable and can’t get nvtop to detect it. Searching I found this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1htxoi6/beelink_mini_s13_intel_n150_linux_driver_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1htxoi6/beelink_mi... Did you add backports or recompile? I think N100 may be supported by stable but not N150.
    - jaimehrubiks 2y ago
      But they are talking about beelink s13 with the intel N150. N100 has been there for a while longer and I've seen guides in the internet for a long time with no specific requirements. I'm running ubuntu 24.04 with nothing extra, runs out-of-the-box (assuming that if it's a VM, you properly do the card's PCI passthrough). I tested nvtop and it works, it shows GPU% usage when I start a movie in jellyfin and change the quality to force trascoding.
ptdorf 2y ago
I wonder if he reads every single line of code. Or even skims over them.
Jotalea 2y 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
buyucu 2y 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.
- silverliver 2y ago
  Same here. Anything I try seems to just work. The only problem is anticheat but even those are starting to behave even when isolated and confined in containers.
  - buyucu 2y ago
    yes, the only games that don't work in Linux are the ones where Linux is explicitly banned by the developer.
diggan 2y 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-=wg7TO09Si5tTPyhdrLLvyYtVmCf+GGN4kVJ0=Xk=5TE3g@mail.gmail.com/T/#u 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".
- wtallis 2y ago
  What you're quoting Linus on is his commentary about the patches landing in the past week, which is supposed to be only bug fixes as the code stabilizes enough for a stable release to be made. New features would lane weeks earlier during the merge window. What's newsworthy here is not anything that was merged recently, just the fact that this new functionality is now available from a stable release. If there was anything really significant from the past week's changelog, it would likely have been reason to delay the stable release for at least another week.
cadamsdotcom 2y 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 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Windows-NT-Sync-RFC-Linux
- NekkoDroid 2y ago
  Do note that these numbers are Upstream vanilla Wine vs Wine+NTSYNC and not Wine+fsync, which is more common and has comparable performance (if not sometimes better[0] according to a valve employee) [0]: https://bsky.app/profile/plagman.bsky.social/post/3lkp26xmco22k https://bsky.app/profile/plagman.bsky.social/post/3lkp26xmco...
rurban 2y 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

191 points by CrankyBear 2y 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?

robertlagrant 2y ago
YouTube comments have lots of smart people in them, sometimes.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago
  That can be simplified by the topic and presentation. Is the content trying to educate, be entertaining or both. Is the topic extremely niche then you will find like minded people with suggestions and discussions.
mhurron 2y ago
If you've been anywhere around linux gaming circles for the past 6-8ish months, you've seen nothing but people not understanding the benchmarks hype NTSYNC. Everyone trying to set appropriate expectations is pretty quickly silenced in whatever manner the platform allows (downvote, etc)
- shmerl 2y ago
  Must be some wrong circles. From what I've seen, it's mostly well known that ntsync is comparable to existing solutions like esync / fsync.
shmerl 2y ago
Hype is not about better performance but about upstream support. It's valuable.
nialv7 2y ago
One exciting aspect of NTSYNC is that it could get into wine upstream. FSYNC is only available in Proton and not in upstream wine, mainly because it is not fully conformant, i.e. it doesn't behave exactly like its Windows counterpart does. But NTSYNC doesn't have this problem.
Adverblessly 2y ago
That is a question of source. If you read the article on GoL instead ( https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/03/linux-kernel-6-14-out-late-due-to-pure-incompetence-dont-get-too-excited-about-linux-gaming-boosts/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/03/linux-kernel-6-14-out-... ) you would have already read that: > For Valve's Proton however, don't go expecting much here with ntsync. As Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais replied to a user on Bluesky to note: > We already include fsync, which should be as fast or faster as ntsync. We developed ntsync as a general solution that'd be acceptable in upstream Wine, but there's no urgency in including it in the Deck / SteamOS kernel.
- tremon 2y ago
  That's odd. Why would wine not accept improvements using fsync from Proton?
  - resoluteteeth 2y ago
    https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50281#c6 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50281#c6

TheCleric 2y ago

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

cube00 2y ago
> But no. It's just pure incompetence. While I don't agree with how he conducts himself on the mailing lists; I respect he uses the same language when talking about himself.
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  Does he willingly take that treatment from others? I don't really know, but that would be the actual test of congruence.
  - SEGyges 2y ago
    I am not deep into the Linus weeds but my impression is that he doesn't especially care if he's on the receiving end of this. It only started to feel different from "well, the Linux list is the PvP zone" when Linus was sufficiently weighty/famous that you almost had to take an insult from him to heart, and he did eventually correct his behavior there.
    - ASalazarMX 2y ago
      I'm also not that of a fan to know that many details, but I'd place my bets in that he actually doesn't care if people speak to him the same way, as long as they have solid arguments. I think Linus is overall one of the goods influences in this strange IT period.
  - 2y ago

jmclnx 2y 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.

dist-epoch 2y ago
Windows did the same thing, in Windows Vista they added some Linux style synchronization primitives, for example condition variables.
devmor 2y ago
Is initcall_blacklist not enough of an option for you?
- jmclnx 2y ago
  I am still on 5.15, I will need to remember to blacklist it. But that does not address the fact Microsoft is slowly taking control of Linux.
  - devmor 2y ago
    In what way do you view this as Microsoft taking control of Linux? This is an effort to support more users leaving Microsoft for Linux and taking their software with them.
Inityx 2y ago
Well, one of the biggest drivers of consumer Linux adoption in recent years has been the Steam Deck, and compatibility with Steam games. The article explicitly calls out how this improves performance for this use case. I think your opinion is an unpopular one.
- tdb7893 2y ago
  Yeah, I know multiple people running Linux at home and Windows compatibility us a critical feature for them. For the people I know not in tech about half would switch if Linux got up to par in: 1. Ability to play any video game 2. Compatibility with hardware (e.g. one of my friends is booting windows temporarily as his graphics card has an issue on Linux) 3. Usability/looks. This is subjective but for people used to Windows for the last couple decades people often find Linux more difficult to use and honestly uglier (Linux is customizable but most people I know are not confident enough to go far from the defaults). This is just my friends, some of whom are engineers and some are normal people when it comes to technical ability, but currently a lot of them want to like Linux but have specific requirements holding them back.

andy_xor_andrew 2y 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?

dayjah 2y ago
I don’t know if this answers your question directly: but the article points out that this is a module, not a primitive that’s in the kernel itself. The idea here is that wine/proton can interact with this module directly if it’s loaded, or continue to use their wrappers around existing fsync if not. I expect that means a little less scrutiny since if it segs the user can choose to not load it and achieve a stable OS.
nialv7 2y ago
Technically this is not a low-level primitive. NTSYNC isn't added as a, say, system call like futex2[0] was. It's instead added as a character devivce - which you can build your kernel without, and functions via ioctls. [0]: https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/futex2.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/futex2.html
no-js-user 2y ago
You've got a nice arc river in "of / getting / to". Easier to find if you look slightly away from that part of the text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)

DominoTree 2y ago

"Linux Torvalds"

dietr1ch 2y ago
The genious and madman behind the Linus Operating System.
genpfault 2y ago
"...a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, ..."[1] [1]: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/security/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbons-isyoursonacomputerhacker.html https://gwern.net/doc/cs/security/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbon...
wyldfire 2y ago
Gell-Mann amnesia [1] is an interesting thing to think about here. But IMO the real problem is that editing for most journalism websites is done very very poorly, if at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

kwar13 2y ago

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

nodesocket 2y 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.

jaimehrubiks 2y ago
What would be the meaning of that? I have a Beelink with N100 for more than a year and HW acceleration works already (I use it in Jellyfin), so I wonder what do you mean that "intel gpu support" would mean.
- nodesocket 2y ago
  What OS are you running? I’m running Debian 12 Stable and can’t get nvtop to detect it. Searching I found this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1htxoi6/beelink_mini_s13_intel_n150_linux_driver_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1htxoi6/beelink_mi... Did you add backports or recompile? I think N100 may be supported by stable but not N150.
  - jaimehrubiks 2y ago
    But they are talking about beelink s13 with the intel N150. N100 has been there for a while longer and I've seen guides in the internet for a long time with no specific requirements. I'm running ubuntu 24.04 with nothing extra, runs out-of-the-box (assuming that if it's a VM, you properly do the card's PCI passthrough). I tested nvtop and it works, it shows GPU% usage when I start a movie in jellyfin and change the quality to force trascoding.

ptdorf 2y ago

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

Jotalea 2y 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

buyucu 2y 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.

silverliver 2y ago
Same here. Anything I try seems to just work. The only problem is anticheat but even those are starting to behave even when isolated and confined in containers.
- buyucu 2y ago
  yes, the only games that don't work in Linux are the ones where Linux is explicitly banned by the developer.

diggan 2y 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-=wg7TO09Si5tTPyhdrLLvyYtVmCf+GGN4kVJ0=Xk=5TE3g@mail.gmail.com/T/#u 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".

wtallis 2y ago
What you're quoting Linus on is his commentary about the patches landing in the past week, which is supposed to be only bug fixes as the code stabilizes enough for a stable release to be made. New features would lane weeks earlier during the merge window. What's newsworthy here is not anything that was merged recently, just the fact that this new functionality is now available from a stable release. If there was anything really significant from the past week's changelog, it would likely have been reason to delay the stable release for at least another week.

cadamsdotcom 2y 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 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Windows-NT-Sync-RFC-Linux

NekkoDroid 2y ago
Do note that these numbers are Upstream vanilla Wine vs Wine+NTSYNC and not Wine+fsync, which is more common and has comparable performance (if not sometimes better[0] according to a valve employee) [0]: https://bsky.app/profile/plagman.bsky.social/post/3lkp26xmco22k https://bsky.app/profile/plagman.bsky.social/post/3lkp26xmco...

rurban 2y 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