Linus Torvalds tonight released the first candidate for Linux version 5.12 following an unusual merging window.
As mentioned last week, the Linux 5.12 merge window started pretty rough with the winter ice storms in the Northwest Pacific, causing the loss of Linus Torvalds’ power, and so in the first week of the merge window, it didn’t managed to handle the new kerne cycle. But it finally managed to catch up this week and get Linux 5.12-rc1 out the door in a timely manner.
Due to that snowstorm, Linus called the Linux code 5.12-rc1 the “Frozen Wasteland” kernel.
Linus continued to note in announcement 5.12-rc1, “Even though it was a slightly smaller join window than the previous ones, it is still big enough to add only my regular join log, not the full list of 10982 unsigned commits of over 1500 people. So it’s more of an aroma of the kinds of things that happened than a deep dive. The only thing that can stand out is that this version has actually done quite a lot of historical cleaning. Yes, we generally have more new lines than we removed the lines, but we had some spring cleaning, removing the old OPROFILE support (users’ tools have been using the “perf” interface for years) and removing more old SoC platforms and various drivers. which no longer make sense.”
See today’s overview of Linux 5.12 features for a more comprehensive look at all the changes to be found with this new kernel cycle.
Linux 5.12 stable should be available in late April or possibly early May, depending on how the rest of this cycle runs. Stay tuned for more Linux 5.12 tests and comparisons in the coming days.