Linux Kernel 4.11 Officially Released (softpedia.com)

prisoninmate quotes Softpedia: Linux kernel 4.11 has been in development for the past two months, since very early March, when the first Release Candidate arrived for public testing. Eight RCs later, we're now able to download and compile the final release of Linux 4.11 on our favorite GNU/Linux distributions and enjoy its new features. Prominent ones include scalable swapping for SSDs, a brand new perf ftrace tool, support for OPAL drives, support for the SMC-R (Shared Memory Communications-RDMA) protocol, journalling support for MD RAID5, all new statx() system call to replace stat(2), and persistent scrollback buffers for VGA consoles... The Linux 4.11 kernel also introduces initial support for Intel Gemini Lake chips, which is an Atom-based, low-cost computer processor family developed using Intel's 14-nanometer technology, and better power management for AMD Radeon GPUs when the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver is used.

Comments

Big THANK YOU to all contributors

[Anonymous Coward]

A big THANK YOU for all the hard work to all contributors.

I cannot imagine using a system built on top of anything else than Linux.
The worldwide supercomputers and HPC clusters tend to agree with me ;-)

Re:API/ABI fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget about silly nVidia drivers. The seriously important thing is; does it support systemd yet?

At the rate systemd is absorbing functionality, the question is now (or soon will be) "Does systemd still support Linux?"

Meanwhile in opensource land...

[DrYak]

Welcome another round of API/ABI breakage: even the latest beta NVIDIA drivers 381.09 are not compatible with this kernel.

Meanwhile, opensource drivers, that are part of the kernel all work.

Intel's opensource driver :
- development paid by Intel themselves
- works with Intel's own opensource openGL driver)
IT WORKS

AMD's opensource driver :
- development paid, among other, by AMD themselves (but also by Valve)
- works with both the opensource driver (whose developement was among other paid by AMD, and is considered the future official driver)
- and the closed source AMDGPU-PRO (that AMD is putting, until the opensource catches up (openCL and Vulkan not up to par yet *) and for the few professional CAD workstation users that needs some weird feature that AMD is never bothering to port to Mesa)
IT WORKS.

Only NVIDIA persist in doing things their way (because it enables them to simply cross-compile** their Windows drivers to Linux, even if that breaks most facilities used by everybody else - see Optimus, etc.).
And only collaborates once in a bluemoon with the Nouveau developpers when it helps their agenda with Tegra mobile GPUs (where Linux support is a must).
(And because of that, even the opensource Nouveau that had to be developped from scratch by unrelated 3rd parties - is problematic)
INSERT LINUS' "FUCK YOU NVIDIA" PIC

So stop blaming Linux dev's for Nvidia's wrong doings.
Everyone else plays nicely with Linux and it works.
Only Nvidia decide to fuck up everything and go against everyone else and you see the end result.

---

* : OpenCL is in the process of getting ported by AMD on their ROCm opensource computing platform. Once that is done, AMD will officially have a good quality opensource OpenCL.
Vulkan: has a closed source implementation inside AMDGPU-PRO that AMD has promised they'll opensource (but they're VERY LATE with the legal review necessary to release the code). Meanwhile a couple of opensource developpers have released RADV which works with most Vulkan games (including through Wine), but isn't complete (still misses tons of extensions that aren't widespread in game) and isn't very performant yet (well of course, it's a very recent addition) (AMD has considered putting priority to opensourcing of those bits of AMDGPU-PRO's Vulkan that could also help RADV developpers the most. But again, they're really behind with these opensourcing efforts.)

** - AMD decided to go the other way around : they wrote an entirely new abstraction layer (called DAL / DC) to be both usable under Windows and Linux and for closed source and Mesa drivers.
Problem : that layer has been written by veteran *windows* developpers at AMD, not AMD's usual opensource inhouse crew.
And it shows.
It makes Linus' eyes bleed.
So currently it's not yet in vanilla kernel, it's still being reworked into something more acceptable.
Once it's done, the last few missing features (e.g.: HDMI, Freesync, etc.) should also work with maintstream kernel on Radeon GPUs.