Linux 5.11-rc5 Kernel Released Following A Busy Sunday

The fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing.

Last week Linux 5.11-rc4 was released and Linus Torvalds characterized it as shaping into a fairly normal release cycle. Linux 5.11-rc5 was quiet too, up until today when there was a rush of last minute pull requests.

Linus Torvalds noted in today's announcement, "So this rc looked fairly calm and small, all the way up until today. In fact, over 40% of the non-merge commits came in today, as people unloaded their work for the week on me. The end result is a slightly larger than usual rc5 (but both 5.10 and 5.8 were bigger, so not some kind of odd outlier)...But the bulk of it all is all the usual miscellaneous fixes all over the place, and a lot of it is truly trivial one- or few-liners...Nothing here makes me go "Uhhuh" in other words."

Overall Linux 5.11-rc5 appears to be in fairly good shape. A notable fix this week is fixing the Itanium IA64 kernel builds after the default kernel configuration of it was busted the past month since the start of the 5.11 cycle.

Still pending is the patch to fix the AMD CPU frequency invariance regression on Linux 5.11 that also provides some nice gains in other workloads too. I've been testing it a lot more this weekend and will have up more results and details on Monday (or see the early details).

Linux 5.11 stable will be out in February. See our Linux 5.11 feature overview to learn about all of the new features coming for this release. Stay tuned for more Linux 5.11 kernel benchmarks.