Linus Torvalds released the first release candidate of Linux 5.12 tonight after an unusual merge window.
As noted last week, the Linux 5.12 merge window got off to a rocky start with winter ice storms in the Pacific Northwest, causing Linus Torvalds to lose power and so he couldn’t handle the new core bike for the first week of the merge window. But in the end he was able to catch up this week and still get Linux 5.12-rc1 out the door on time.
Because of that blizzard, Linus was codenamed Linux 5.12-rc1 the “Frozen Wasteland” kernel.
Linus further noted in the 5.12-rc1 announcement: “Even if it was a slightly smaller merge window than the previous one, it’s still big enough that the added one is just my usual merge log, not the full list of the 10982 non-merge commands from over 1500 people. So it’s more of a taste of the kind of things that happened than a deep dive. The only thing that you might notice is that this release has actually done quite a bit of historical clean-up. Yes, overall we still have more new rules than we removed rules, but we did have some spring cleaning, removing the legacy OPROFILE support (the user tools have been using the “perf” interface for years) and several older SoC platforms have been removed and several drivers that are no longer valid.
For a more exhaustive look at all of the changes found with this new kernel cycle, see the current Linux 5.12 feature overview.
Linux 5.12 stable should be released in late April or possibly early May, depending on how the rest of this cycle goes. Stay tuned for more Linux 5.12 testing and benchmarking in the coming days.