The godfather of Linux delivers a Valentine’s Day gift to Linux users everywhere.
Linus Torvalds has delivered version 5.11 of the Linux kernel to the world. He announced the new version in a weekly state of the kernel post published on February 14.
“Nothing unexpected or particularly scary happened this week,” he wrote, “so here
we are – with 5.11 tagged and pushed out.”
The latest version, 5.11, contains several changes ranging from new hardware enablement (from both AMD and Intel), ARM hardware support, networking enhancements, to driver updates.
Linux 5.11 has also included the Syscall User Dispatch (SUD) for running modern Windows games on Linux with Proton or Wine. Additionally, it has added support for Ouya Game Console based on NVIDIA Tegra 3 and Intel Integer Scaling (IS) graphics for pixel art type games.
Good news for AMD fans
AMD admirers get support for more silicon plus finer controls for power management and handling workloads. The new kernel also improves Linux performance of some AMD CPUs. It has enabled AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) support and added drivers to work around CPU frequency invariance.
It also brings 6GHz band (Ultra High Band or UHB) support for WiFi 6E in the Intel WiFi “IWLWIFI” driver.
Big inclusions in this release include support for Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology. This allows developers to use walled-off enclaves of memory. This allows some processes to carry on without the rest of the system knowing about it.
A range of other features included
Linux Kernel 5.11 includes support for newer ASUS gaming laptop keyboards as well as ThinkPad palm sensor detection support. There have been continued performance improvements to Btrfs filesystem.
The new kernel has sound support for Intel Alder Lake, and there are USB4 and Thunderbold support improvements. The release also enables multi-input for Synaptics point stick or touchpad device. They also introduced a new kernel bus called Auxiliary Bus.
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