Kernel 5.11 feature high lights.

[SimonF]

Linux Kernel 5.11 Features
Let’s take a look at some features and improvements that you can expect with Linux Kernel 5.11.

Wi-Fi 6E Support Added
Wi-Fi 6E is the biggest update to the Wi-Fi standard in the last 20 years. The new standard aims to provide a new wireless band to the public, the 6 GHz band. This will help reduce signal drops on connected devices over a distance and can transfer more data faster across longer distances.

With Linux Kernel 5.11, support has been added for 6GHz band / Ultra High Band (UHB). Support for Wi-Fi 6E chips from manufacturers such as Intel, MediaTek and Qualcomm has also been added.

Other notable additions include, Fast Initial Link Setup (FILS) for the Qualcomm ath11k driver, Dual-Band Concurrent (DBDC) support for the MediaTek Mt7915 driver and various other performance improvements.


RISC-V Improvements
RISC-V is an open standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), it is basically an open-source architecture for CPUs. Unlike ARM and Intel’s x86, RISC-V CPUs are completely open-source. Anyone can manufacture, modify and redistribute them without any licensing requirements.

Linux Kernel 5.11 has brought about significant improvements and support for the RISC-V CPU architecture including OpenRISC support for the LiteX SoC controller driver and general support around the SoC. LiteX is a small footprint SoC based on Migen.

Intel Iris Xe GPU Support Added
With the release of Linux Kernel 5.11, Intel’s line of discrete GPUs, the “Iris Xe” will be supported.

Intel reportedly worked on it and merged quite a few updates before the final release of the kernel.

Intel Itanium Support Dropped
Linux Kernel 5.11 is dropping support for Intel’s Itanium (IA-64) series of processors as there are too many issues with the architecture and fixing those are not possible unless Intel does something.

As it stands, Intel has stopped maintaining the IA-64 architecture and by July 29, 2021, the chips will reach EOL.


Intel SGX Support Added
After numerous rounds of extensive review over the past few years, Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) has finally been added to the Linux Kernel with 5.11.

Intel SGX is a hardware-based isolation and memory encryption standard which increases the security of application code and data by protecting them from potential disclosure and modification.

It achieves this by providing developers with the ability to create partitions of sensitive information into enclaves, these are areas of execution in the memory that are more secure.

Intel Platform Monitoring Technology Support Added
Intel’s Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) is supported with Linux Kernel 5.11.

It is a hardware telemetry reporting tool meant for use internally within organizations and data centers for monitoring performance and collecting data on their hardware. This will make life easier for system administrators as they will get all of their data in a user-readable format via XML.

AMD Zen 2/Zen3 CPU Performance Enhanced
Earlier, in December 2020 there were reports that the performance of Zen 2/Zen 3 CPUs were affected terribly due to the introduction of CPU frequency invariance support and the implementation of the Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor.


As major Linux distros moved towards using CPUFreq Schedutil by default, there were major performance penalties across the board affecting Zen 2/Zen 3 processors and a solution to these problems was very important.

Linux Kernel 5.11 seems to resolve the problems caused by it and AMD Zen 2/Zen 3 CPUs are running fine without any major performance penalties.

AMD Van Gogh APU Support Added
AMD’s Van Gogh APUs are rumored to be the next-gen APUs with Zen 2 CPU cores and the RDNA2 graphics engine paired with either LPDDR5 or LPDDR4x memory.

With their recent addition of about 275,000 lines of code, it is becoming more clear that it is going to release very soon and will support Linux Kernel 5.11 out of the box.

Nvidia RTX 30 “Ampere” GPU Support Added
Nvidia’s latest range of RTX 30 “Ampere” GPUs are now supported by the Linux Kernel. The initial open-source code was added via the Nouveau driver and users can expect the GPUs to show a display output.

But, the GPUs are just limited to the kernel mode-setting and miss out on hardware acceleration, right now we can just hope for more support down the line.

 

Link to article.

 

https://news.itsfoss.com/linux-kernel-5-11-release/