Fearless Coyote, Linux Kernel 4.11 is Out

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel 4.11, code-named Fearless Coyote. The new release comes with performance improvements and support for additional hardware.

Announcing the release, Torvalds wrote on LKML, “We still had various smaller fixes the last week, but nothing that made me go ‘hmm..’. Shortlog appended for people who want to peruse the details, but it's a mix all over, with about half being drivers (networking dominates, but some sound fixlets too), with the rest being some arch updates, generic networking, and filesystem (nfs [d]) fixes. But it's all really small, which is what I like to see the last week of the release cycle.”

Version 4.11 brings full support for DisplayPort MST on Intel video cards, allowing audio out to the monitor connected through the DisplayPort. According to kernelnewbies.org, this release also makes the swap implementation more scalable, making it more suitable for use with modern storage devices, which is going to help cloud providers who tend to overcommit memory more aggressively and fit more VMs to a platform with a fast swap device.

This release also introduces support for the implementation of the "Shared Memory Communications-RDMA" (SMC-R), an IBM protocol that provides RDMA capabilities over RoCE transparently for applications exploiting TCP sockets.