On 15 September, Linus Torvalds announced that Linux kernel 6.11 is now live for everyone. The new Linux kernel is expected to be part of upcoming Linux distros like Ubuntu 24.10, Fedora 41, and many more.
Linux kernel 6.1 includes many upgrades, including AMD improvements, Intel upgrades, and other essential changes. The new update includes improved forcewake behavior, simple HWMon code, and more.
Regarding the AMD improvements in the Linux kernel 6.11, some patches exist in the next RDNA4 series of AMD GPUs. Hence, it will benefit those who want to use RDNA4 GPUs for their Linux distros.
As mentioned above, Intel has made some changes as the team works on the initial support for new Battlemage GPUs. Significant changes are taking place in the Linux kernel 6.11 update, such as the novel driver subsystem, which allows upstream support for Bluetooth/WLAN chips on the Qualcomm platforms.
It introduces getrandom() onto the VDSO x86 setups and offers on-the-fly zeroing out of pages, even when the system is under high memory utilization. Virtual CPU hotplugging is now available on the Linux kernel 6.11 for AArch64 (ARM64) ACPI systems for adding and deleting virtual CPUs in VMs.
However, the new version also explicitly states that block drivers can be written in Rust. Starting with Linux kernel 6.11, support for the dedicated slab allocators will block heap-spraying attacks.
AMD’s SEV-SNP secured virtualized mechanism also seems to support the updates. STACKLEAK and memory hotplugging support were introduced for the RISC-V architecture.
It is also bringing support for the perf kvm-stat features, among other things, such as ParaVirt steal time, etc., for the architectures, including LoongArch KVM.
This new update contains the unified VMware hypercall API layer, which simplifies the way to add API support into the confidential computing solution. NUMA support is available for the RISC-V ACPI-based system.
Linux kernel 6.11 release was accompanied by the dmaengine_prep_peripheral_dma_vec() function with the aim of enabling easier transfer via DMA vectors, some improved documentation for AXI DMA, and STMicro STM32 DMA3 support.
It has also changed the disk accounting framework of the bcachefs file system to deal with accounts just like the standard btree keys and also brought server side support for the pNFS NVMe layout type in the NFS server.
The update additionally incorporates improvements on CPU architectures of the type of Lunar Lake and also the Loongson-3 CPUFreq driver. Finally, more changes have been made to the new drivers as well as to the support hardware within Linux kernel 6.11.
