Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.11-rc1 as expected tonight, which is the end of the two-week merger window that went through Christmas.
Linus Torvalds noted in the 5.11-rc1 announcement, “Well, that’s average, unless you look at the real difference and notice another huge amount of AMD GPU description headers, dwarfing all the “real” changes here. The AMD “Van Gogh” file extensions actually contain about two-thirds of the entire patch, even if it comes from basically a single commission that just adds the registry definitions. We’ve had it before, I’m sure we’ll see it in the future as well: header files are probably generated from the description of the hardware for all the possible bitmaskers, and so on. Oh dear. If you ignore that area, everything else looks normal. Driver updates dominate, but all the usual other suspects are there: arc updates, file systems, networking, documents, and tools.“
That AMD Van Gogh APU support for the Linux kernel is about 275,000 code, most of which are automated headers. Due to the size of the auto-generated headers, AMDGPU is the largest driver in the Linux kernel and more than 10% of the kernel-based kernel tree. These numbers just keep rising higher while the new support is still being added.
There have been approximately 12,500 changes that have been merged over the past two weeks. Check out our Linux 5.11 feature overview to learn more about the plethora of changes taking place in this cycle.
Linux 5.11 stable should be out in February. I’ve been working on a lot of Linux 5.11 core metrics and things look good except for the AMD performance regression with the Schedutil governor for Zen 2 and newer where frequency invariance data is now used … More tests and insight there in the next day or two hammered out various systems with criteria and different configurations to try to improve the functionality.