Linus Torvalds, as expected, released Linux 5.11-rc1 tonight, which marks the end of the two-week merger window that went through Christmas.
Linus Torvalds noted in ad 5.11-rc1, “Well, it’s average, unless you look at the real differences and notice another huge dump of AMD GPU descriptor header files, which completely overrides all “real” changes here. AMD’s “Van Gogh” include file additions are actually about two-thirds of the entire patch, even if it comes basically from a single commit that just adds the registry definitions. We’ve had this before, I’m sure we’ll see it in the future as well: header files probably generated from the hardware description for all possible bit masks, etc., become very large. Oh well. If you ignore this area, everything else will look normal. Driver updates dominate, but all the other usual suspects are there: arch updates, file systems, network, documents and tools.“
That APU support from AMD Van Gogh for the Linux kernel is about 275,000 lines of code, most of which are automatically generated header files. Due to the size of the automatically generated headers, AMDGPU is the largest driver in the Linux kernel and more than 10% of the kernel tree based on lines of code. These numbers only continue to increase with new support continuing to be added.
There have been about 12,500 changes merged in the past two weeks. See our overview of Linux 5.11 features to learn about the multitude of changes that will occur in this cycle.
Stable Linux 5.11 is expected to be released in February. I’m already working on many Linux 5.11 kernel benchmarks and things are looking good, in addition to AMD’s performance regression with Governor Schedutil for Zen 2 and later, where frequency invariance data is now used … More tests and insights there the next day or two as hammering several systems with different benchmarks and settings to try to improve functionality.