Tonight, Linus Torvalds released the first release candidate for Linux 5.12 after an unusual merge window.
As noted last week, the Linux 5.12 merge window had a rough start with winter ice storms in the Northwest Pacific, which caused Linus Torvalds to lose power and thus the first week of the merge window could not handle the new cores. cycle. But finally he was able to catch up this week and still get Linux 5.12-rc1 out the door on schedule.
Due to the snowstorm, Linus called Linux 5.12-rc1 codenamed the “Frozen Wasteland” kernel.
Linus further noted in the 5.12-rc1 announcement, “Even though it was a slightly smaller merge window than before, it’s still big enough that my regular merge file was added, and not the full list of the 10982 non-merge commitments by 1500+ people. It is therefore more a scent of the kinds of things that have happened, rather than a deep dive. The one thing that may stand out is that this version has done a fair amount of historical cleanups. Yes, in general we still have more new lines than we removed lines, but we cleaned up a little spring, and we removed the old-fashioned OPROFILE support (the utilities have been using the “perf” interface for years) and removes several older SoC platforms and various drivers that no longer make sense.”
Check out the current Linux 5.12 feature overview for a more comprehensive look at all the changes you can find with this new kernel cycle.
Linux 5.12 stable should be out by the end of April or possibly early May, depending on how the rest of this cycle plays out. Stay tuned for more Linux 5.12 testing and benchmarking in the coming days.