Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.11-rc1 tonight as expected, marking the end of the two-week merge period that went through Christmas.
Linus Torvalds commented in the 5.11-rc1 announcement: “Well, it’s average, unless you look at the actual differences and notice another huge dump of AMD GPU descriptor header files, completely overshadowing any “real” changes here. The AMD “Van Gogh” -including file appendices are in fact about two-thirds of the entire patch, even if it actually comes from a single commit that only adds the registry definitions. We’ve talked about it before, I’m sure we’ll see it in the future too: header files likely generated from the hardware description for all possible bit masks etc. become very large. Oh well. If you ignore that area, everything else will look normal. Driver updates dominate, but all the usual other suspects are there: arch updates, file systems, networks, documents, and tooling.“
That AMD Van Gogh APU support for the Linux kernel is about 275,000 lines of code, most of which are auto-generated header files. 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 tree based on code lines. Those numbers only keep rising higher with the new support being added.
About 12,500 changes had been merged in the past two weeks. To learn more about the plethora of changes coming in this cycle, see our Linux 5.11 feature overview.
Linux 5.11 stable should be released in February. I’ve worked on many Linux 5.11 kernel benchmarks before and it looks good next to the AMD performance regression with the Schedutil governor for Zen 2 and newer where frequency invariance data is now used … More testing and insight there in the next day or two hammered different systems with benchmarks and different configurations to try to improve functionality.