A few days ago it was announced that Release of the new version of the Linux Kernel 6.11, Linus Torvalds himself was the one who made the announcement, since after two months of work, the new version includes important improvements.
Among the most notable new features are the support for atomic block writing, the addition of operations such as bind() and listening() in io_uring, and a mechanism to block software interrupt handlers. In addition, the ability to modify executable files reflected in memory, was introduced support for developing block device drivers in Rust, among other things.
Linux 6.11 brings with it more than 15,000 fixes made by more than 2,000 developers. The patch is 85 MB in size, affecting more than 13,000 files, with almost a million new lines of code and more than 260,000 removed.
Main news in Linux 6.11
This new version of Linux 6.11 introduces a large number of important changes and among the most important innovations we can find in the disk subsystem, I/O and file systems. It stands out andl support for block-level atomic writing, this allows a set of blocks to be written in full or not written at all, protecting against hardware failures. This function is activated with the flag RWF_ATOMIC In the call pwritev(), and information about their support in individual files can be obtained through statx(). In addition, it is now allowed to writing to executable files linked to running processes, removing an old restriction with no practical use.
Another new feature that Linux 6.11 presents is the new rnull driver, equivalent to null_blk, but written in Rus, which opens up the possibility of developing block device drivers in the Rust language.
On the file system Btrfs, New mounting options have been added ("ignoremetacsums" and "ignoresuperflags") that facilitate file system recovery after a failure. Also, ntfs3 now supports the attributes "compressed" and "immutable" while F2FS and Ext4 have improved the handling of case-insensitive names, optimizing their processing. Ext4 has also optimized the function jbd2_transaction_committed, improving performance on fast drives by up to 20%.
Also the functionality of listmount() and statmount() calls has been extended, allowing better handling of mount points and their options, even when there is no access to the initial namespace.
In addition, it is worth highlighting the Introduction of a new mechanism to block software interrupts (Bottom-Half), which improves both performance and latency reduction in systems real-time and common cores.
Also New IOCTL operations added for the Pseudo-FS NSFS, which allow transform process identifiers between different namespaces. Regarding BPF support, iterators were introduced to work with bit masks, in addition to improvements in system security and efficiency through a notification mechanism for processes in user space.
For Power management, a new subsystem was included that manages the order of device activation, necessary for platforms such as Qualcomm. The module was also introduced «Sloppy Logic Analyzer» to create logic signal analyzers using GPIO, and added support for Runtime Constants, which optimizes constant variables that remain unchanged after the initial system load.
Added improvements related to the use of Rust in the development of drivers and modules, with support for Rust version 1.80. Additionally, abstractions were introduced to manage firmware and access user space. In the x86-64 architecture, a system was implemented UretProbe Optimized to improve tracking of values ​​returned from userspace.
As for memory, they were added Memory reservation options and new parameters for the CGROUP memory controller, such as "SWAPPINESS", which adjusts the balance between freeing memory and cache pages. Searching for virtual memory areas in /proc/pid/maps.
Moreover, Linux 6.11 introduces encryption improvements with a new AES-GCM implementation for x86-64 systems, which uses advanced vector instructions, achieving a performance increase of 156%. Additionally, initial support for virtualized environments was added with the AMD SEV-SNP extension, improving the security of virtual machines.
Finally on the support improvements side, Linux 6.11 adds the Initial support for AMD RDNA4 GPU ("GFX12"), along with technologies such as DCN 4.0.x, GC 12.0 and SDMA 7.0. In DRM ´The driver has been rewritten for EDID parameters, and the i915 driver now supports Battlemage Xe2 GPUs, enabling CMRR mode by default. Also added support for the SM7150 platform and X185 and a505 GPUs in the driver msm DRM.
In terms of audio, new chips and codecs are incorporated, including those from Intel Panther Lake, Asahi Kasei AK4619 and Cirrus Logic CS530x, among others. In addition, support is provided for the SoC Snapdragon X Elite from Qualcomm, which uses a 12-core Oryon CPU and Adreno GPU.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about it, you can check the details in the following link