Linux 6.11 Released

[homebrewer]

6.10 (TEN, the previous one) has been a very problematic release for me, with one desktop running into four major bugs in total: three separate amdgpu bugs resulting in video corruption, hangs and crashes, and now that I'm on 6.10.10 and those seem to be fixed, the system intermittently refuses to come up from sleep mode.

Anyone else having similar experience? This is the first time something like that happened in a decade of using the latest stable kernel release (in my experience, it's actually been stable for all that time except for 6.10).

[davidlt]

I am really surprised with RNDA3 support. I have never seen so many issue with iGPU (APU). It started with VP9 decoder issue (e.g. just playing videos on YouTube was enough to trigger it), but that got fixed after a very long time (required a new firmware). Multiple constant [different] crashes, but you can workaround most of them by adding amdgpu.sg_display=0 to your bootargs. It's already listed in Arch Linux wiki, Gentoo wiki, etc.

Again, I was surprised by the number of firmware and driver issues since RNDA1/2/3 have been around for years now.

[gigatexal]

6.10 broke my fedora gaming proton box and I was on holiday at the time and so upset I just nuked it and put windows on it to play games. Now it's only powered on on the weekends to play games and I've moved all my linux needs to a VM on my overspecc'd Mac.

I also had an AMDGPU system. 5600X, AMD 6800 GPU, Fedora 40. -> now win11 (which has so much cruft out of the box I am considering nuking it and going back haha)

[dsissitka]

I got bit twice.

First there was the bug that broke Chromium based apps when using SELinux. https://lore.kernel.org/all/30fc5b38165e4eda57d640eca76b7df1...

Then 6.10.6 didn't want to boot.

Usually I run into issues two or three times a year. I guess this time around they just happened to be a little closer together.

[mahkoh]

I've had a few hard crashes (system freezes completely, ssh does not work) over the last two weeks on 6.10.x kernels. I am hoping that it is https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3142 (and not hardware failure) but I've been unable to capture the kernel panic if it does occur.

Never had such an issue before.

[trulyrandom]

Just to add a non-problematic experience report to the mix: I've been using 6.10 for months on two AMD machines with different hardware (one with a 7840U and one with a 5700XT) without any issues whatsoever.

[nitinreddy88]

Ack. AMD gpus broke left and right with this version. Lot of issues reported : https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues

Even the latest Linux kernel 6.11 still have same issues (atleast for me)

[wooque]

That's why I stick with Debian.

[mnahkies]

No idea if related, but I had a really frustrating issue recently on fedora/similar kernel version.

Resume from sleep stopped working, and boot started taking minutes. Going through logs I was able to figure out it was probably usb related, and that sleep worked if you were patient enough to wait for a timeout, but the issue persisted with all cables unplugged. The error code was something along the lines of failing to provide enough power for a device, I suspected my new speakers despite them having dedicated wall outlet power (usb audio despite being on the motherboard AFAIK)

Long story short someone in a thread somewhere suggested unplugging from the wall for 10 min and to my surprise it worked - I guess it cleared the fault somehow and it hasn't reoccurred (yet). Might be worth a try.

[0xC0ncord]

I too have been having AMD GPU video artifacting lately, but so far that is the only regression I've noticed in 6.10.x. I am still on 6.10.8 so I'm not sure if 6.10.10 will contain a fix for me just yet.

[WaffleIronMaker]

I was using a Fedora release with the 6.10 kernel, and I experienced frequent logouts and restarts, almost once per day. It's nice to see that others were having similarly poor experiences.

[mardifoufs]

The past few releases were more problematic for me yeah. It's super anecdotal since I never used Linux before the v5.xx kernels but in comparison to those yes it's a bit less stable.

[sinker]

Kernel version 6.8 broke suspend ($ systemctl suspend) for me. I run two machines with near identical setups. I upgrade my "preview" machine first before updating my primary machine to test for defects.

If I boot from kernel version 6.5, suspend works fine. Hold shift while your machine is booting and the grub menu will allow you to select a different kernel version.

[quicksilver03]

The amdgpu driver has been the main source of issues for me on 6.10, but I had issues on older 6.x versions as well: for example, on a desktop with 2 monitors, I had to turn on the 2 monitors simultaneously or the UI would freeze.

[IshKebab]

How does Linux handle testing? They don't seem to have a CI system as far as I know. Presumably there's no big lab with automated testing on real hardware. Does anyone know how releases are tested?

[TomK32]

Is that just AMD? On my thinkpad X270 playing videos in Firefox is just a mess. All sorts of problems while Chromium is just fine. It's also fine on a copy of my system that I run on a thinkcentre tiny.

[mixmastamyk]

Doing well on a recent AMD, although I didn't upgrade until about 6.10.7 or so.

There were problems on earlier kernels, but they were mostly fixed by a firmware update. Kernel already had support by that time.

[lifeinthevoid]

amdgpu on my 6.10 kernel has been crashing constantly too. It makes me want to go back to Intel. My workaround has been to let the ryzen 7700 iGPU run at its max clockspeed of 2200 Mhz …

[globular-toast]

Yeah, same problems with 6.10 and amdgpu. Radeon Pro WX 3200 fwiw. I've been on 6.8.9 for several weeks now. Just today I booted 6.10.7 and it's been stable so far. I haven't tried to put the system to sleep yet, though.

This isn't the first time I've had problems with the stable kernel, though. A while back I had problems, also graphics related, with Intel i915 (my onboard graphics that I used before I got the AMD card). It took a while but it eventually got fixed. I haven't looked to see if there's a bug tracked for the AMD problem.

[skerit]

6.10 broke my AMD 5700XT eGPU setup. Had to downgrade to 6.9

After I upgraded to a 7900XT it worked again.

[aseipp]

amdgpu is shit for me, my friend. Funny story: my headless server with a small Navi 1 workstation card (repurposed) couldn't be SSH'd into last week. Went and plugged in a monitor, rebooted, and the framebuffer got stuck during stage 1 while fsck'ing my disk. OK, I think to myself, it's probably taking a while to fsck after N boots, happens once every few months. Doesn't change for 48 hours. Turns out my machine had just run out its DHCP lease, so it had a new IP and I didn't realize it, which is why I couldn't log in. So I log in, and..

What was wrong? What actually happened was that on bootup, the amdgpu driver would panic and fault during boot exactly when fsck was happening, and the framebuffer would be stuck forever. So it just looked like a filesystem issue but in reality my graphics output was merely fubar; the system itself was otherwise fine tnough.

This is reliable and reproducible for me; it always faults at almost the exact same spot at boot every time, for this kernel version at least. In reality amdgpu has been unreliable for me for 5+ releases at this point on a card less than like 7 years old.

Really considering moving over to a small cheap nvidia card and just running Nouveau instead. At least then I might have a reliable framebuffer.

[asmor]

Early 6.10 somehow broke bluetooth audio for me, only letting me use HSP.

[shmerl]

What GPU?

[daemonologist]

Yeah I've experienced a fair number crashes with 6.10 (multiple point releases) on my 680M. Earlier kernels were fine in my recollection although I didn't bother downgrading, and Windows remains rock solid on the same system.

[vardump]

Long way since Linux 3.11 for Workgroups [0]:

[0]: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/linux-kernel-3-11-...

[unethical_ban]

Man, time flies. I remember Slashdot's thread announcing it.

Linux versioning now is the worst kind of arbitrary! It's the web-browser "just iterate the number" method, but with the appearance of semantic versioning.

[xyst]

I’m just at awe to see Torvalds still publishing the release notes for Linux kernel.

[unixhero]

Rejoice!

Edit: These two items are huge! support for writing block drivers in Rust, support for atomic write operations in the block layer,

[meiraleal]

When will be the year of GNU/Linux for smartphones? Android is not it. I wish we could install distros in a smartphone as easy as it is in desktop

[shatsky]

"As easy as in desktop" not going to happen anytime soon. Phone "bootloader firmwares" lack full description of phone hardware in stardartized form like PC ACPI does, expecting customized OS kernel to know the phone it's running on. Phone devices lack capability to emulate something ancient-but-standard, expecting customized OS to include drivers for all of them. That's enough to make unified OS images impossible.

[squarefoot]

Fighting against well known hardware on PCs is one thing, doing the same against mobile manufacturers because they refuse to release any documentation is a nightmare. Linux will have a hard time becoming a reality in the mobile world because of hardware manufacturers hostility, not for any of its faults. Pine64 had to design the PinePhone platform from scratch for this exact reason, still they encountered so many blocks that when it finally became available it was already too old.

[martinsnow]

Nobody wants it outside of a tiny hobbyist segment.

[marcodiego]

Bets for 6.12: sched_ext, PREEMPT_RT anyone?

[benakh]

Anyone here that can comment on the new snapdragon X support?

[ufo]

Does anyone know how they'll implement the runtime constants?

[johnnyApplePRNG]

Does this mean i can suspend my Linux laptop to ram now?

[jeffbee]

Can't wait for Ubuntu to drop this into the Oracular beta for a couple of days and pretend like that was tested before release.

[rafaelturk]

Isn’t that the very definition of what an upcoming release should do?

[ruthmarx]

Isn't that a large part of what makes Ubuntu Ubuntu?

[le-mark]

> but if you list the important advancements of humankind (like LLMs, drug development, basic science breakthroughs etc.)

Amusingly, free and open source kernels (including bsds) are key to enabling all of that.

[jsheard]

> if you list the important advancements of humankind (like LLMs [...])

Bait used to be believable.

[abenga]

LLMs are not an "important advancement of humankind". Might as well add crypto if that's the bar.

[xyst]

Pretty bad take and calling it “a collection of drivers, some VMM, and some syscalls” is a bit reductive.

Linux kernel is built and maintained across a variety of people. To my knowledge, nobody is directly paid by Linux foundation yet these people come together to slowly improve the kernel everybody uses either directly or indirectly. It’s also a demonstration of the greatness that humans can achieve if we work together to solve a problem(s) outside of the typical “capitalistic” motivations (ie, money)

[st_goliath]

> ... But c'mon, it's just a collection of drivers, some VMM, and some syscalls. But people fetishize it because it's complex and fun to get into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_Law ?

[smileson2]

it's more beneficial than whatever your parents were able to pull off

[lpapez]

Peak HN comment.

[jmorenoamor]

A nuclear power plant is just a bunch of pipes and a pile of uranium.

/s

We like it because it is free, it is not a technological amazing breakthrought, but as a collaborative project it's kind of successful in time, you have to agree on that :)