Andrew Morton made for an exciting Friday evening by sending out his "MM" pull request for [1]Linux 6.14 as the large collection of memory management related patches for this next kernel version.

There is a ton of exciting MM changes this cycle for the Linux 6.14 kernel release due out in March. Some of the most exciting changes I found from this Linux 6.14 MM pull include:

- [2]The Uncached buffered I/O support from Jens Axboe is included! With the new RWF_DONTCACHE flag, this uncached buffered I/O support is [3]a nice performance win .

- A rework of the swap allocator locks that also simplifies swap allocator locking was found to provide a 400% speedup for one workload while a 35% reduction for kernel build times when using swap on zRAM. The 400% win was in a VM scalability test with pmem as SWAP. Details within [4]this patch series .

- Google's Yu Zhao contributed a few MGLRU fixes as well as some new MGLRU performance optimizations to that important code.

- Support for large folios with TMPFS rather than being only limited to PMD-sized folios.

- Removing the global swap cgroup lock was found to provide a 10% speed-up for TMPFS-based kernel builds.

- Improved memory accounting accuracy by accounting for page tables at all levels.

- Various DAMON improvements like page level properties based monitoring.

See [5]this pull request for the full list of MM feature changes submitted for Linux 6.14.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.14

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Uncached-Buffered-IO-Linux-6.14

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Uncached-Buffered-IO-2024

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241230174621.61185-1-ryncsn@gmail.com/

[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250124162248.60104eec848619a187242392@linux-foundation.org/