First Arch Linux ISO Release Powered by Linux Kernel 5.11 Is Here, Download Now

Arch Linux 5.11

It’s March, and a new Arch Linux ISO release was generated today for those who want to install this lightweight and flexible GNU/Linux distribution on their PCs, powered by Linux 5.11.

That’s right, Arch Linux 2021.03.01 is now available and it’s the first Arch Linux ISO release to be powered by the latest and greatest Linux kernel 5.11 series, which introduces numerous new features and performance improvements, as well as new and updated drivers for top-notch hardware support.

Linux kernel 5.11 introduces lots of goodies for AMD users, including support for AMD “Van Gogh” and “Dimgrey Cavefish” GPUs in the open-source AMDGPU driver. It also adds support for Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), suspend-to-idle support in user-mode, as well as a new system-call interception mechanism.

Other major changes in Linux kernel 5.11 include support for contiguous memory allocator in the RISC-V architecture, support for task-local storage in the BPF subsystem, big block mode support in the virtio-mem mechanism, and the ability to use 64-bit ARM memory tagging extension.

Linux 5.11 also makes it possible to mount OverlayFS filesystems within a user namespace by an unprivileged process and re-export filesystems mounted over NFS, adds new ioctl() calls in the F2FS file system to give you control over compressed files, and brings a new “needs repair” parameter in the XFS file system to block mount operations until the file system is repaired.

So, if you want to install the Arch Linux distro on a new computer with the Linux 5.11 kernel, you can now download the Arch Linux 2021.03.01 ISO image from the official website. Existing Arch Linux users don’t need to download the new ISO image, but only to update their installations by running the command below in a terminal emulator, and reboot their computers once all updates were installed successfully.

sudo pacman -Syu

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