Linux 5.11-rc6 Released With Itanium Support Now Orphaned

Linux 5.11-rc6 is out ahead of the stable release of Linux 5.11 coming in February.

Linux 5.11-rc5 last weekend was on the quieter side while for 5.11-rc6 it's a bit busy. Linus Torvalds noted today, "Things look a little calmer than last week, and over-all very average for rc6. So - like always this late in the release schedule - I'd certainly have liked things to be even calmer, but nothing here really stands out."

Torvalds went on to add in the 5.11-rc6 announcement, "The diffstat is quite flat, meaning lots of small fixes, with the exception of one new LED driver, and a flurry of PI futex fixes (and one nouveau patch that is just a lot of trivial lines). And all the stats look normal: average number of commits, and they are all in the usual places, with most of the patch being drivers (gpu, networking, sound, etc), but we obviously have all the usual suspects with arch updates, and a smattering of fixes to core code (kernel, mm, networking, filesystems)."

One of the notable changes this week was the orphaning of Intel Itanium support and with that a fix to restore the support after recent breakage. We'll see if the Itanium IA-64 support gets into better standing or ends up being removed in the not too distant future.

Aside from orphaning Itanium, there were a lot of other fixes throughout the massive kernel.

Still missing from Linux 5.11-rc6 is the fix for the big AMD frequency invariance regression. That regression fix will hopefully be mainlined this coming week.

See our Linux 5.11 feature list for a look at the changes coming in this kernel. Linux 5.11 is likely what will be powering Ubuntu 21.04 among other upcoming distribution releases.