Linus Torvalds, as expected, released Linux 5.11-rc1 tonight, marking the end of the two-week merger window past Christmas.
Linus Torvalds mentioned in ad 5.11-rc1, “Well, it’s normal unless you look at the real differences and notice another huge storage of AMD GPU descriptor header files, which completely removes all the “real” changes from here. AMD “Van Gogh” file additions actually include about two-thirds of the entire patch, even if it comes from virtually a single commit that adds only registry definitions. I’ve had it before, I’m sure we’ll see it in the future: the header files probably generated from the hardware description for all possible bit masks, etc. they become very very large. Good. If you ignore that area, everything else seems normal. Driver updates dominate, but all other common suspects are present: archive updates, file systems, network, documents, and tools.“
That AMD Van Gogh APU support for the Linux kernel is around 275,000 lines of code, most of which are automatically generated header files. Due to the size of the automatically generated headers, AMDGPU is the largest driver in the Linux kernel and more than 10% of the kernel tree based on lines of code. These numbers continue to increase as new media is added.
There have been about 12,500 changes combined in the last two weeks. See the overview of Linux 5.11 features for the plethora of changes that follow this cycle.
Linux 5.11 stable should be available in February. We have already worked on many benchmarks of the Linux 5.11 kernel and things look good apart from AMD’s performance regression with the Schedutil governor for Zen 2 and newer, where frequency invariance data is now used … More tests and information there the next day or two, as several systems with different parts and configurations were hammered to try to improve functionality.