Linux kernel 6.11 is officially out now

Linus Torvalds announced the final release of the Linux kernel 6.11, as usual with a ridiculous amount of improvements, fixes, support for new and future hardware releases and everything in between.

From the release announcement here's what Linus Torvalds said:

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.

The last week was actually pretty quiet and calm, which is nice to see. The shortlog is below for anybody who wants to look at the details, but it really isn't very many patches, and the patches are all pretty small. Nothing in particular stands out - the biggest patch in here is for Hyper-V Confidential Computing documentation.

Anyway, with this, the merge window will obviously open tomorrow, and I already have 40+ pull requests pending. That said, exactly _because_ I'm on the road, it will probably be a fairly slow start to the merge window, since not only am I on my laptop, there's OSS Europe starting tomorrow and then the kernel maintainer summit on Tuesday. So if I don't get to your pull request immediately, please be patient.

But before that merge window activity, please do give the latest release a try!

Going over the full list of changes some quick highlights for you:

• Improvements for ROG Ally X support.
• Lots of work for Intel Xe2 graphics support.
• More AMD RDNA4 GPU enabling work.
• An EXT4 filesystem optimization with "improving IOPS and throughput on fast devices running Async Direct I/O by up to 20%".
• More control over swappiness behaviour.
• Improvements for Snapdragon X1 Elite support including the Asus Vivobook S15 and the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x.
• Fixes for Asus ROG 2024 laptops using CS35L41 audio support.
• Further improvements for Framework Laptops, including their Chromebook Edition.
• Added support for magic keyboard backlight on T2 Macs.
• Added a DMI orientation quirk for the OrangePi Neo Linux Gaming Handheld.
• Asus Zenbook Duo improvements for connecting / removing the keyboard.
• Better support for the Orange Pi 3B.
• An interesting change I spotted was to "Optimise psi_group_change a bit" from developer Tvrtko Ursulin, where they noted:
  • "The benefit is both in the code size and CPU time spent in this function. YMMV but on my Steam Deck, while in a game, the patch makes the CPU usage go from ~2.4% down to ~1.2%. Text size at the same time went from 0x323 to 0x2c1."

I'm just searching through and cherry-picking random bits here. It's a ridiculously long read. See more in the full changelog.

Is there a particular change you're excited to see that made it into Linux kernel 6.11? Let me know in the comments.