As expected the Linux 6.11 kernel has been promoted to stable and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 24.10, Fedora 41, and other autumn Linux distribution releases.

It's expected to be the Linux 6.11 release day! We are just hours away from hopefully seeing Linux 6.11 stable christened as the kernel set to power the likes of Ubuntu 24.10 and Fedora 41. Here's a reminder of some of the most interesting new features and changes to look forward to with Linux 6.11.

The modern AMD kernel graphics driver "AMDGPU" is the biggest driver within the mainline Linux kernel and is approaching six million lines of code albeit a large chunk of that is made up of auto-generated header files for each supported GPU. But this AMDGPU kernel driver is becoming "really really big" that it's beginning to cause issues for Plymouth that commonly provides the initial boot splash screen experience on modern Linux desktops.

Yet another early pull request for the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window is the sound (audio) driver updates for this next kernel cycle. There is a lot of sound driver work this cycle from new audio bits to removing legacy Intel driver support.

Ahead of the expected Linux 6.11 stable release today and the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit happening this coming week in Vienna, Intel engineer Rafael Wysocki submitted early the ACPI updates among the other areas of the kernel he oversees as part of the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window.

With the mainline Linux kernel beginning to see DeviceTree support for a few Snapdragon X1 powered laptops like the ASUS Vivobook S15 and Lenovo Yoga Slim7x, Ubuntu developers at Canonical appear to be beginning their exploration around supporting some of the Snapdragon X1 hardware with Ubuntu Linux.

The Linux 6.11 kernel is expected to be christened as stable tomorrow. Ahead of that stable release one of the last minute "fixes" is adding in another ID for upcoming Intel Arrow Lake processors.

As a very last minute change ahead of tagging GNOME Mutter 47, merged this morning to Mutter is support for the XDG session management Wayland protocol. This protocol is useful for letting clients request support from the compositor for saving the window state for use on future executions. However, it's currently disabled by default and won't be entirely baked until GNOME 48.

Niri 0.1.9 is out today as the latest update to this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that is written in Rust.

Casilda is a new open-source project by GNOME developer Juan Pablo Ugarte to serve as a Wayland compositor widget. Casilda allows for embedding other processes windows within a GTK4 application.

The EROFS read-only file-system changes have been submitted now for ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. Notable this cycle is EROFS adding support for file-backed mounts.

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window opening on Monday, the printk updates were submitted in advance given the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit also taking place next week in Vienna. Notable with the printk updates is finishing up the NBCON console work that is notable as the last major blocker before real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can be finally mainlined.

KDE developers were busy this week in Germany for their annual Akademy developer conference but they still managed to release a Plasma 6.2 Beta as well as some early feature work toward Plasma 6.3.

GNOME developers have been making progress on being able to individually encrypt user home directories as well as modernizing platform infrastructure as part of the investments made by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund.

As written about early in the year, future Intel CPUs will be moving past the "Family 6" identification used since the mid-1990s with the P6 micro-architecture. Since then Intel has continued releasing new CPUs under "Family 6" with different model IDs while AMD has been more open to changing its Family ID every Zen generation or two. With Intel using Family 6 for so long it led to a lot of Linux kernel code just relying on Model ID comparisons for determining between Intel CPU generations and the like. Thus a lot of Intel CPU model handling reworks are needed for preparing future Intel CPU generations that will no longer be in Family 6. With Linux 6.12 it looks like that work will be wrapping up.

AMD engineers today posted the first "request for comments" patches in enabling support for Secure AVIC guest handling as a new hardware feature with upcoming processors.

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used on Windows as a shader compiler back-end and both for Windows/Linux as part of their OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack can now be compiled for RISC-V 64-bit.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku OS is out today with its fifth beta release as it works toward the long-awaited Haiku R1 stable release.

Following the GNOME Foundation Executive Director leaving after less than one year, the GNOME Foundation has formally begun their search for a new executive director.

While not quite as exciting as the latest ARM64 laptops sporting the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 series SoCs, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptop using the older Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is now available to boot and install using the generic ARM64 images of the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10.