Linux 5.11-rc7 Arrives - Time For The Weekly Celebration Testing The New Kernel

For those looking for something more interesting than the Super Bowl today, the seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing.

Linus Torvalds in today's announcement also couldn't help but to poke some fun at the Super Bowl, "So it's the biggest sporting day of the year here in the US, when everybody is getting ready to watch the yearly top TV commercials, occasionally interrupted by some odd handegg carrying competition that I still haven't figured out the rules for after twenty-odd years here. It's kind of a more violent and hands-on team-oriented version of the traditional egg-and-spoon race, and involves a lot of standing around, apparently waiting for the next commercial to come on. Outside the US, everybody scratches their heads about the whole thing, and hopefully life goes on with the weekly celebration involving compiling and testing new kernels instead."

Linus wrote in the rc7 announcement, "Nothing hugely scary stands out, with the biggest single part of the patch being some new self-tests. In fact, about a quarter of the patch is documentation and selftests. The rest is just the usual random noise - architecture updates, drivers (gpu and usb stand out a bit), some filesystem fixes, and a few core VM and networking fixes."

Linux 5.11-rc7 does not include the CPUFreq patch for addressing the AMD Linux 5.11 performance regression caused by the introduction of frequency invariance support. But that regression fix should be sent in within the next few days, leading to much better AMD performance on Linux 5.11.

If all goes well Linux 5.11 stable will debut next Sunday followed by the start of the Linux 5.12 merge window. See our original Linux 5.11 feature overview to learn more about all the exciting changes for this kernel that should be powering the likes of Ubuntu 21.04.