Linux 6.11-rc5 released with slimmed down Bcachefs fixes set

The Linux kernel 6.11-rc5 has already been released as stable today, about half a day earlier than planned due to Linus Torvalds' travels.

Linus Torvalds has shipped the Linux kernel 6.11-rc5 much earlier than usual due to time differences and ongoing travel. Torvalds stated in the announcement of v6.11-rc5:

“I usually release early Sunday afternoon, but I'm in an unusual time zone and that would have been almost a full day earlier than usual. So I delayed things enough so that at least it was Sunday at my house, if not anywhere near afternoon.

Aside from the timing, there's not much unusual here. The diffstat looks pretty flat, which means “mostly pretty small changes.” There are a few bumps here and there, but nothing alarming: the biggest of these is actually just a self-test update. The bulk of the (non-self-test related) patches are in drivers (network and GPU dominate – as is tradition), with some filesystem updates (bcachefs, but also smb and erofs), and the rest is mostly core networking and some architecture updates.”

Linus Torvalds was in Hong Kong this week for the Open Source Summit China conference, so Linux 6.11-rc5 is now available.

As a result of the weekend drama surrounding the size of the Bcachefs “fixes”, a revised pull request was considered ahead of v6.11-rc5. This merge brings a reduced number of Bcachefs patches for the week. Just a number of smaller fixes for this experimental CoW filesystem.

Linux 6.11-rc5 also includes a HID Quirk fix for the ASUS ROG Ally X for anyone interested in this handheld gaming device.

The stable version Linux 6.11 should be released in mid-September.