Linus Torvalds issued the first Linux 5.12 release candidate tonight after an unusual merge window.
As noted last week, the Linux 5.12 merge window got off to a hard start with winter ice storms in the Pacific Northwest, causing Linus Torvalds to lose power and therefore in the first week of the merge window he was unable to to deal with the new cycle kerne. But in the end, he managed to update himself this week and still release Linux 5.12-rc1 on time.
Due to the battle of the snowstorm, Linus called Linux 5.12-rc1 the “Frozen Wasteland” kernel.
Linus continued to notice in the 5.12-rc1 ad, “Even if it were a slightly smaller merge window than the previous ones, it is still big enough to attach only my usual merge log, not the full list of 10982 commits not merged by more than 1,500 people. So it’s more of a taste of the kinds of things that happened, rather than a deep dive. The only thing that may stand out is that this release really did a good historical cleanup. Yes, in general we still have more new lines than we removed, but we did a general cleanup, removing the legacy OPROFILE support (user tools have been using the “perf” interface for years) and removing several legacy SoC platforms and several drivers that don’t make more sense.”
See the overview of today’s Linux 5.12 features for a more exhaustive overview of all the changes to be found with this new kernel cycle.
Stable Linux 5.12 is expected to ship in late April or possibly early May, depending on how the rest of this cycle unfolds. Stay tuned for more testing and benchmarking of Linux 5.12 in the coming days.