As expected, Linux Torvalds has made the launch official de Linux 6.11 just a few moments ago. There is no news in that there are many new hardware features, although this time it is AMD who has the majority. It is not too surprising, or at least it has focused on something that I am also paying attention to, which is precisely that type of hardware that we find in many handheld computers, handheld PC or portable consoles.
What follows is a list with news most notable updates that have arrived with Linux 6.11. As expected, it also includes a section with several security fixes. We leave you with her.
Linux 6.11 Highlights
- Recorders:
- Work continues on Xe driver support for the upcoming Xe2 graphics for both Lunar Lake and Battlemage.
- AMD RDNA4 GPU support is initially on Linux 6.11. Support is preliminary but pretty decent on Linux 6.11.
- AMDGPU ISP 4.x IP support for Image Signal Processing technology for laptops/webcams.
- AMDGPU Hardware Replay to more easily reproduce GPU crashes and aid in debugging.
- Intel eDP Panel Replay support.
- Support for monochrome TV mode.
- Monochrome logo support for Panic DRM infrastructure.
- Other enhancements to open source graphics drivers.
- AI/Accel:
- Support for Intel Gaudi 2D accelerator.
- Intel NPU driver improvements with iVPU accel driver for Intel Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, and Lunar Lake NPUs.
- Processors:
- AMD Core Performance Boost management is added to the AMD P-State driver.
- AMD Fast CPPC support to help with power savings and energy efficiency on capable SoCs.
- Support for AMD SEV-SNP guests with mainline kernel.
- Intel Performance Limit Reasons to indicate through the TPMI driver and expose to userspace via DebugFS why CPU cores are operating at a reduced performance level.
- Significantly faster AES-GCM cryptographic performance for modern Intel and AMD processors with optimized AVX-512/AVX10 and VAES code.
- Audio support for Intel Panther Lake.
- Improved support for Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake.
- Support for Mobileye EyeQ 6H SoC for that self-driving/car chip.
- Some ARM64 improvements thanks to Linus Torvalds himself and better handling of compressed kernel images on ARM64.
- Intel Sub-NUMA Clustering (SNC) will no longer misbehave when used with Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT).
- New ISA extensions for RISC-V and initial NUMA support for ACPI-based RISC-V systems.
- More kernel features for LoongArch.
- Performance event additions for new Intel CPUs.
- More AMD Zen 5 CPU IDs.
- Storage/File Systems:
- DM-VERITY multi-buffer hasing for better performance.
- Atomic block writes for NVMe and SCSI storage.
- Flushing optimized for Device Mapper.
- New Bcachefs features such as disk accounting rewriting and self-repair in case of I/O read errors.
- FITRIM support for XFS.
- A nice performance optimization for EXT4.
- The NTFS driver prepares FileAttr support.
- UBIFS hardening against power loss.
- Various file system fixes.
- A VFS fix for corruption or security issues as a bug fix from five years ago.
- Linux on laptops:
- Better support for Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS ARM laptop thanks to new EC code.
- Fan speed and temperature and load control for Chrome OS driver to help with Marco laptops.
- A ChromeOS EC LED driver also to benefit Framework laptops.
- Keyboard backlight support for more T2-equipped Apple Macs.
- Linux 6.11 EFI will pretend to be booting Apple macOS on some dual-GPU Macs to avoid issues.
- The Snapdragon X1 powered ASUS Vivobook S15 and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x have DeviceTree support with Linux 6.11, but several features/functionality are missing for both X1 Elite laptops.
- Other Hardware:
- ASUS EC Sensors driver for ProArt X670E CREATOR WIFI motherboard.
- The Dell PC Extras driver will provide additional features on Dell systems such as support for fan mode control on select models.
- New HID drivers and more HID BPF features.
- The Raspberry Pi PiSP controller for the Raspberry Pi 5 camera system.
- New wireless and wired networking hardware supported by Linux 6.11 kernel.
- Realtek RT1318 audio support.
- USB and Thunderbolt improvements.
- Defaults to a better SATA link power management policy.
- Updated CXL documentation.
- Other kernel innovations:
- Greater control over swapiness behavior with a new “swapiness” argument for memory reclamation.
- Preparations for TCP device memory.
- A new baseline for the Rust toolchain/infrastructure as the minimum version to compile Rust kernel code.
- Support for VMware Hypercall API.
- New power sequencing controller subsystem.
- Many MM optimizations and improvements.
- With the upstream kernel it is now easy to build a Pacman kernel package for use with Arch Linux.
- Linux security:
- More Arm CPU cores need the speculative SSBS solution.
- A new Spectre BHI mitigation option designed for cloud environments.
- Implementation of getrandom() in vDSO.
- Hardened access to /proc/[pid]/mem to improve system security.
- A dedicated bucket allocator for improved security.
- FineIBT's default settings are now adjustable at compile time.
- Fixed a security issue with Landlock sandboxed apps where apps could remove restrictions on themselves.
Linux 6.11 will be announced any day now and will be available for download soon the tarball in kernel.orgIts arrival to the different Linux distributions will depend on the development philosophy of each one.