Linux kernel 5.1.1 is now available to download

May 13, 2019 13:06 GMT  ·  By

The recently released Linux 5.1 kernel series received its first  point release over the weekend, which marks it as a stable kernel branch ready for mass deployments.

Announced by Linus Torvalds on May 6th, the Linux 5.1 kernel series brings numerous new features and improvements, among which we can mention better file system monitorization, new cpuidle governor called TEO, support for configuring Zstd compression levels in Btrfs, and the ability to boot to a device-mapper device without using initramfs.

Linux kernel 5.1 also adds support for cumulative patches in live kernel patching, the ability to use persistent memory as RAM, faster and more scalable asynchronous I/O, support for delivering safe signals in presence of PID reuse, more preparations for the year 2038, and lots of new and updated drivers.

Now ready for mass deployments

Now, just one week later, the Linux kernel 5.1.1 was released by Greg Kroah-Hartman, who will maintain the Linux 5.1 kernel series until its end of life, thus marking it as stable on the kernel.org website instead of mainline, which is still considered a development version. This means that all GNU/Linux distributions can now adopt the latest Linux kernel 5.1.

"I'm announcing the release of the 5.1.1 kernel. All users of the 5.1 kernel series must upgrade," said Greg Kroah-Hartman in a mailing list announcement. "The updated 5.1.y git tree can be found at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary."

Linux kernel 5.1.1 is a small update that changes a total of 36 files, with 715 insertions and 536 deletions. If you want to upgrade your GNU/Linux distribution to the Linux 5.1 kernel series, we recommend waiting for the latest version to land in the stable software repositories. Of course, you can also download Linux kernel 5.1.1 from kernel.org.