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Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) development milestone of the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel series.
It’s been two weeks since the merge window for Linux kernel 6.11 opened, on the same day Linux kernel 6.10 was released, so it’s time to test drive the RC (Release Candidate) versions, the first being available for download right now from Linus Torvalds’ git tree here or the kernel.org website.
Linux kernel 6.11 is expected to bring things like a new driver subsystem to enable support upstream for Bluetooth/WLAN chips on Qualcomm platforms, getrandom() support to vDSO on x86 systems adding a new kind of mapping to mmap(2) that lets the kernel zero out pages anytime under memory pressure, virtual CPU hotplug support for AArch64 (ARM64) ACPI systems, and a new mechanism to create interrupt domains.
On top of that, Linux kernel 6.11 updates KVM support for the LoongArch architecture with ParaVirt steal time support, perf kvm-stat support, and some VM migration enhancements, enables KVM halt poll shrinking by default, rewrites the disk accounting scheme for the bcachefs file system to store accounting as normal btree keys, and implements NFS server-side support for the new pNFS NVMe layout type.
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Also new is a dmaengine_prep_peripheral_dma_vec() to support transfers using dma vectors and documentation and user in AXI dma, along with STMicro STM32 DMA3 support, a minimum version for the Rust toolchain, support for the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPU platforms, Loongson-3 CPUFreq driver support, fast CPPC support in the amd-pstate cpufreq driver, and hwmon interface support to the ACPI fan driver.
Linux kernel 6.11 also promises a unified VMware hypercall API layer to provide for adding API support for confidential computing solutions, a new logic behind the background block group reclaim, automatic removal of cgroup after removing a subvolume, and new ‘rescue=’ mount options for the Btrfs file system, NUMA support for RISC-V ACPI-based systems, as well as many updated and new drivers for better hardware support.
“The diffstats are also (once again) dominated by some big hardware descriptions (another AMD GPU register dump accounts for ~45% of the lines in the diff, and some more perf event JSON descriptor files account for another 5%),” said Linus Torvalds. “But if you ignore those HW dumps, the diff looks perfectly regular: drivers account for a bit over half, the rest is roughly one-third architecture updates, one-third tooling and documentation, and one-third “core kernel” (filesystems, networking, VM and kernel).”
The final release of Linux kernel 6.11 is expected in mid or end of September 2024, which depends on how many Release Candidate (RC) milestones Linus Torvalds will announce until then. As such, it will be out on September 15th if there will be only seven RCs or on September 22nd if eight RCs are to be announced.
Last updated 2 hours ago