Intersect has released cardano-node 11.1.1 as a pre-release. The maintainers explicitly state that it is not yet recommended for mainnet, but the version continues technical preparation for the Dijkstra-era hard fork and introduces several changes operators will need to account for before a future production upgrade.
Version 11.1.1 removes V1 LedgerDB and the LMDB storage backend entirely, so LMDB users must move to another backend. Ledger snapshots are now designed to be predictable and Mithril-compatible, making them comparable and shareable across nodes. The release also completes removal of the legacy iohk-monitoring-framework tracing system, requiring configurations that still use old keys to migrate to the new tracing setup.
Performance work includes more efficient transaction forwarding between peers, faster Plutus script validation and mempool snapshots designed to remain responsive as the mempool grows. Initial network and consensus support for Peras is present but disabled by default behind the experimental NodeToNodeV_16 protocol version. The experimental gRPC/UTxO-RPC interface also gains additional methods for tip, genesis and UTxO access.
Operationally, the OCI images for cardano-node, cardano-tracer and cardano-submit-api can now run as a non-root user and on a read-only filesystem. Intersect lists a slight increase in memory use during sync compared with 11.0.1, though substantially less than the regression seen in 11.1.0. The release is therefore an important Dijkstra-readiness step, but its pre-release status remains the key deployment constraint.