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Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Linux 5.11 kernel series.
That’s right, two weeks have passed since Linux kernel 5.10 LTS was released and the merge window of the Linux kernel 5.11 opened, so now it’s time to get busy again and test the next major Linux kernel branch, which looks to be an average release, not too big, but not too small either.
The biggest changes in Linux kernel 5.11 appear to be made around the AMD GPU open-source graphics driver for AMD Radeon GPUs, which received a “huge dump” of descriptor header files, along with support for the AMD “Van Gogh” GPU family, which looks to be about two-thirds of the entire RC1 release.
Other than that, the Linux 5.11 kernel promises lots of updated and new drivers, and the usual improvements and fixes for filesystems, networking, architectures, tooling, and last but not least documentation. You can check out Linus Torvalds’ merge log here for all the technical details.
“Two weeks have passed, Christmas is over, and so is the merge window,” said Linus Torvalds. “As usual we had more than 1500 actual developers, and roughly 12,500 changes merged. That’s pretty much our average these days.”
The final release of Linux 5.11 is expected sometime in mid-February, but this is just my guess as it depends on how many RCs (Release Candidates) will be released during its development cycle and probably various other factors.
Until then, if you want to take the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 5.11 kernel series for a test drive, you can download the source tarball right now from kernel.org. However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don’t install it on any production machine.
Last updated 3 years ago
