Linux 4.11-rc6 is now ready for public testing

Apr 9, 2017 21:00 GMT  ·  By

A bit earlier than expected, Linus Torvalds announced today the availability of the sixth Release Candidate (RC) milestone for the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel series.

Coming one week after the RC5 build, Linux kernel 4.11 RC6 appears to be slightly bigger, but Linus Torvalds is assuring us that things are looking fairly normal for this development cycle, which means that if they stay like this until next week when RC7 launches, the final release of Linux kernel 4.11 is coming April 23.

As for the changes included in the sixth Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.11, there's a little bit of everything. According to the appended shortlog, pretty much the same amount of patches are present for drivers, architecture updates, networking stack, filesystems, and core kernel changes.

"It's a bit bigger than RC5, but not alarmingly so, and nothing looks particularly worrisome. Knock wood," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "The only slightly unusual thing is how the patches are spread out, with almost equal parts of Arch updates, drivers, filesystems, networking and 'misc'."

Linux kernel 4.11 is bringing many features later this month

Later this month, some of us lucky enough to get access to newer stable kernel series as soon as they're out (e.g. Gentoo or OpenSuSE Tumbleweed users) will be able to enjoy the new features of the Linux 4.11 kernel, which include improvements to the power management of the AMDGPU graphics driver.

Intel's Gemini Lake GPUs also appear to get initial support in Linux kernel 4.11, along with support for Aspeed AST2500 displays, support for newer Raspberry Pi devices, support for Realtek ALC1220 audio codec, and support for Wacom Intuos Pro tablets. The complete list of new features will be revealed then.

Until then, we invite you to download the source tarball of Linux kernel 4.11 Release Candidate 6 right now from kernel.org or via our website and take it for a test drive. As usual, please try to keep in mind not to replace your stable kernel with this pre-release version, and remember to report bugs if you find any.