Linux Kernel 6.11 Released, This is What’s New

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 6.11, which is the kernel version Ubuntu 24.10 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS will offer.

Fittingly, this update arrives a few days before the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit takes place in Vienna, Austria. In his message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List to sign-off on the release Torvalds’ writes:

“I’m once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it’s Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out”, and asks kernel devs to “give the latest release a try” before getting stuck in with the 6.12 merge window, which opens tomorrow.

For a zip through this release’s most notable changes, read on.

Key Linux 6.11 Features

Now, each and every new Linux kernel brings a bunch of bring-up and plumbing for new and upcoming Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and other components yet to be released. While interesting, most of us won’t benefit from those changes any time soon, so I won’t focus on it.

Because effectively it’s just “well, duh” stuff: “…and now temperature sensors for a GPU consumers won’t have access to for 11 months now work, and sound for a CPU family coming out in 2025 is in place” — great to know, but also a bit of a given.

It’s the kernel support/improvement/fixes for hardware that is already out there in devices people can buy and are using that I feel is of more interest, since there could be a tangible real-world benefit in upgrading to this kernel version.

AMD

Linux 6.11 adds AMD Core Performance Boost control to the AMD P-State driver, allowing to opt in/out of turbo and boost frequency ranges, and control performance boost for each individual core. The recent Power Profiles Daemon release sounds primed to support this.

Also new in the AMD P-State driver is AMD Fast CPPC. This power-efficiency feature for recent Ryzen (Zen 4) mobile processors effectively delivers marginally better performance, between 2-6%, at the same power levels, depending on the task.

AES-GCM decryption/encryption is as much as 160% faster on modern AMD (and Intel) processors – work done by the same Google developer that developed major gains in AES-XTS performance in the Linux 6.10 kernel release.

There’s also support for running x86 kernels as a guest using AMD SEV-SNP encrypted virtualisation feature via KVM.

Intel

Aside from that bring up I said I’ll be skipping over, there’s a small clutch of interesting Intel changes this kernel for ‘Lunar Lake’ devices (which have just gone on sale), including perf subsystem support for the performance monitoring unit (PMU) on these chips.

Elsewhere, there’s a tweak to the TPMI driver to enable user-space (by way of DebugFS) for Intel Performance Limit Reasons reporting, which provides details on why CPU cores are running at lower performance levels than expected.

I’m not sure here are any Linux apps which currently probe for that data, but presumably some may now appear as this kernel version filters out to the wild.

Intel servers running Linux 6.11 can now make use of Sub-NUMA clustering for increased performance on NUMA workloads even when Intel’s Resource Director Technology (RDT) is enabled. The two technologies previously conflicted.

ARM & RISC-V

Fixing a few annoyances Linus himself hit while doing kernel work on his powerful new ARM64 setup compressed kernel images can now be installed (and not just built), and code merged to improved support for a small set of other niggles.

ARM64 now supports CPU hotplug on ACPI systems, with documentation explaining that “CPU hotplug in the arm64 world is commonly used to describe the kernel taking CPUs online/offline using PSCI.” The more you know!

RISC-V gains support for memory hot plugging under Linux 6.11, plus a clutch of new ISA extensions, STACKLEAK security support, initial NUMA support, console output, and cache info on ACPI-based systems, and other misc changes.

This kernel also includes support for several ARM-powered laptops…

Hardware

The 2019 Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS (an early Windows on ARM laptop using a Snapdragon 850 SoC) gains a new embedded controller driver in Linux 6.11 to support, among other things, battery and power supply information – important on a portable!

Sticking with ARM, this kernel includes initial support for a pair of Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops (i.e., “Copilot+” models): the ASUS VivoBook S 15 has better initial support, but with slow drive speeds, no working USB or HDMI out, than the Lenovo Slim 7x.

Anyone out there running Linux on a Chromebook (as I do) will be interested to hear Linux kernel 6.11 furthers mainline support for devices through a pair of new drivers.

The new cros_ec_hwmon driver exposes fan speed and temperatures for newer Chromebooks via the ChromeOS Embedded Controller (CrOS EC – also used in the some Framework 13 AMD laptops).

The new cros_charge-control driver supports setting a charge thresholds, again via CrOS EC. As this leverages sysfs in user-space, if a Linux distribution/DE offers a way to set a charge threshold that will now work on select Chromebooks and Framework 13 laptops.

Also of benefit to the Framework 13 laptop, Linux kernel 6.11 a new ChromeOS EC LED driver to, er, adjust multi-colour LEDs based on various events/triggers/inputs I guess.

There’s also mainline Linux kernel support for fan control on newer Dell systems (laptop, PC, all-in-one, etc), the Raspberry Pi PiSP camera on the Pi 5, Realtek RTL8192DU USB Wi-Fi adapters, and the Thrustmaster TCA Yoke Boeing joystick.

Graphic designers, animator, and digital artists wanting to enhance their creativity on Linux with apps like Krita and Blender will be stoke to know the Huion Inspiroy 2 S and Dial 2, and XP-PEN Deco Mini 4 tablets (and pens) work out-of-the-box in Linux 6.11.

Other changes

• Linux 6.11 no longer prevents writes to busy executable files
• Swappiness argument support for memory.reclaim
• Extensions to the listmount() and statmount() system calls
• Support for block drivers written in Rust
• Atomic write operation support in block subsystem on NVMe and SCSI drives
• io_uring subsystem supports bind() andlisten() operations
• Btrfs filesystem recovery support improved
• Btrfs block-group reclaim better able to avoid unavailable space issues
• ntfs3 filesystem now supports “compressed” and “immutable” file attributes
• Pidfd filesystem supports ioctl() calls
• VMware Hypercall API
• Monochrome logo can be displayed on kernel panic
• New driver subsystem for power sequencing
• Keyboard backlight works on more T2-equipped MacBooks
• ethtool utility tweaks

Plus a whole lot more – the LWN merge summary for Linux 6.11 is a great jumping off point for learning more the key new features in this version, with explanations, links to in-depth articles, and the relevant code commits.

Install Linux Kernel 6.11

Linux 6.11 is a nice kernel uplift with a host of foundational, security, and performance improvements, and expanded hardware support.

So how do you upgrade to or install Linux kernel 6.11?

Well, you can always download the Linux kernel source code and compile it yourself, or wait for your Linux distribution to package up and release this update as a software update — but not all do.

Ubuntu 24.10 includes Linux 6.11 by default, and this kernel version will be back ported to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS early next year.

Users running the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS typically get new Linux kernels as a software update a few weeks after they go stable. This is because System76 package them – they don’t come from Canonical/Ubuntu.

Other Linux blogs encourage those on Ubuntu to installCanonical mainline kernel builds. These are not intended for regular users: they’re not signed, can fail to boot, won’t receive security updates, and may lack Ubuntu-specific patches/fixes.

That said, plenty of people do run them—do you? Let me know in the comments—so if there is a feature or fix in Linux 6.11 you can’t wait for, those pre-packaged DEBs are one route.