For this release, Linus Torvalds changed the code name from "Unicycling Gorilla" to "Linux for Workgroups" and modified the logo that some systems display when booting: it now depicts a Tux holding a flag with a symbol that is reminiscent of the logo of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was released in 1993.



From The H Online:

In addition to the experimental power management features for Radeon GPUs that must be enabled manually via the radeon kernel driver's "dpm=1" parameter, the new kernel also supports Intel's Rapid Start Technology – a technology that can mainly be found in notebooks with SSDs and Intel chipsets and which, in certain conditions, allows the firmware to briefly wake up a system from Suspend-to-RAM in order to shift it into Suspend-to-Disk. In Linux 3.11-rc1, the Lustre cluster filesystem has been added to the staging branch, which is the area for code that is in development but doesn't yet satisfy the kernel developers' quality requirements. Zswap, a component that tries to compress and store in RAM memory areas that would otherwise need to be swapped, has now left the staging branch. The new kernel supports KVM and Xen virtualisation on ARM64 processors; using Xen requires version 4.3 of the Xen hypervisor.

With the release of Linux 3.11-rc1, Linus Torvalds has, as usual, closed the merge window phase during which he adds a new kernel version's major changes. During the stabilisation phase that will now follow, mainly minor changes will be integrated to fix bugs. This phase usually takes eight, or sometimes only seven weeks; the latter was the case with Linux 3.10, which was released two weeks ago. Unless the summer holidays in the northern hemisphere slow down the normal release rhythm, Linux 3.11 will likely be released in the first or second week of September.

  "Linux for Workgroups": Linux 3.11's feature set now confirmed