Linux 6.1.19 LTS & 6.2.6 Released With AMD System Stuttering Workaround

Following last night's Linux 6.3-rc2 release that brings a workaround for system stuttering on some AMD Ryzen systems, that workaround was quickly back-ported to the Linux 6.1 LTS and 6.2 stable series and spun into new releases for Monday morning.

With this morning's Linux 6.1.19 and Linux 6.2.6 releases there are just a few patches with the most notable change being the back-port for the AMD Ryzen system stuttering.

As explained in the article Sunday and when bringing up the Linux issue last month, since Linux 6.1 there have been reports of "system stuttering" on some AMD Ryzen systems with outdated fTPM firmware. It was a known issue on Windows last year but only became an issue on Linux since 6.1 when the AMD ftPM's hardware random number generator (HWRNG) began being used by default. AMD issued updated firmware to avoid the problem last year but not all Ryzen systems/motherboards have received updated firmware or in some cases users just haven't applied the updates yet.

The workaround in Linux 6.3-rc2 and now in the 6.1 and 6.2 series is simply disabling the hardware random number generator when on known fTPM versions known to exhibit this issue.

So if you've been experiencing intermittent system stuttering issues on Linux 6.1+, go forth and update to the latest point release for this workaround if you have no system firmware updates otherwise available.