Linus Torvalds announced today the launch of Linux kernel 6.11, the most recent stable release of the Linux kernel featuring a host of new capabilities and enhancements.
Key features of Linux 6.11 include a novel driver subsystem facilitating upstream support for Bluetooth/WLAN chips on Qualcomm platforms, getrandom() availability in vDSO on x86 setups providing a new type of mapping for mmap(2) allowing on-the-fly zeroing out of pages amidst memory pressure, virtual CPU hotplug ability for AArch64 (ARM64) ACPI systems, and a mechanism to initiate interrupt domains.
Additional innovations are the dmaengine_prep_peripheral_dma_vec() function to aid transfers using dma vectors, extensive documentation and utilization in AXI dma, incorporation of STMicro STM32 DMA3 support, backing for a minimal version of the Rust toolchain, compatibility with Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPU architectures, Loongson-3 CPUFreq driver enhancements, rapid CPPC support in the amd-pstate cpufreq driver, and hwmon interface enhancements to the ACPI fan driver.
Moreover, Linux kernel 6.11 augments KVM capabilities for the LoongArch architecture including ParaVirt steal time support, perf kvm-stat features, and various VM migration improvements, activates KVM halt poll shrinking by default, revamps the disk accounting framework within the bcachefs file system to handle accounts as standard btree keys, and rolls out NFS server-side support for the novel pNFS NVMe layout type.
There’s also support for block drivers written in Rust, a dedicated bucket slab allocator that protects against heap-spraying attacks, initial support for AMD’s SEV-SNP secure encrypted virtualization mechanism, Rust abstractions for firmware loading, as well as memory hotplug support and STACKLEAK support for the RISC-V architecture.
Linux kernel 6.11 also brings 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.
Linux kernel 6.11 will be another short-lived branch supported for only a few months. It will be succeeded by Linux kernel 6.12, whose merge window has now been officially opened by Linus Torvalds and which should be the next long-term supported (LTS) kernel series due out in mid or late November 2024.
You can download Linux kernel 6.11 right now from Linus Torvalds’ git tree or the kernel.org website if you are interested in compiling it on your GNU/Linux distribution. However, it is advisable to wait until Linux 6.11 is available in your distribution’s stable software repositories before updating the kernel.
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