Valentines Day Special: AMD Users should Immediately Switch to the Latest Linux 5.11 Kernel

The latest launch of the Linux kernel options some spectacular efficiency enhancements for AMD {hardware}. Released over the valentine’s day weekend, Linux kernel 5.11 mounted a serious efficiency regression that impacted the AMD Zen structure. Thanks to the fix, Zen-based processors resembling Ryzen and EPYC have been benchmarked as being sooner out of the field than on earlier kernels. Also debuting within the release is help for AMD “Van Gogh” and “Dimgrey Cavefish” GPUs.

The semiconductor company has lately put out various Linux-related job postings, and the enhancements to AMD {hardware} within the newest launch is additional proof that the chip large is actively working to enhance help for its {hardware} on Linux.

Other changes

Apart from AMD-related enhancements, the newest launch additionally options plenty of enhancements associated to Intel {hardware}. Some of the highlights are help for the set of security-related instruction code known as Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) and the Intel Integer Scaling (IS) graphics help that is notably helpful for pixel art games.

There’s additionally help for wi-fi routers that feature Intel WiFi 6GHz Band (WiFi 6E). At the identical time, Intel WiMax support has been demoted and is destined to the identical destiny because the lately orphaned Itanium help.

As typical there are several other tweaks and enhancements for the whole lot from file system enhancements to bug fixes within the Xen hypervisor.

You can obtain the release and compile it yourself or wait for it to make its way into the official repositories of the main distros soon.