Linux 5.12-rc1 Released As The "Frozen Wasteland" Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 28 February 2021 at 08:02 PM EST. 15 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
Linus Torvalds issued the first release candidate tonight of Linux 5.12 following an unusual merge window.

As noted last week, the Linux 5.12 merge window was off to a rough start with winter ice storms in the Pacific Northwest causing Linus Torvalds to lose power and thus the first week of the merge window he wasn't able to deal with the new kerne cycle. But ultimately he was able to catch up this week and still get Linux 5.12-rc1 out the door on schedule.

Due to that snowstorm battle, Linus codenamed Linux 5.12-rc1 the "Frozen Wasteland" kernel.

Linus went on to note in the 5.12-rc1 announcement, "Even if it was a slightly smaller merge window than previous ones, it's still big enough that appended is just my usual merge log, not the full list of the 10982 non-merge commits by 1500+ people. So it's more of a flavor of the kinds of things that have happened rather than a deep dive. The one thing that perhaps stands out is that this release actually did a fair amount of historical cleanup. Yes, overall we still have more new lines than we have removed lines, but we did have some spring cleaning, removing the legacy OPROFILE support (the user tools have been using the "perf" interface for years), and removing several legacy SoC platforms and various drivers that no longer make any sense."

See today's Linux 5.12 feature overview for a more exhaustive look at all of the changes to find with this new kernel cycle.

Linux 5.12 stable should be out in late April or possibly early May depending upon how the rest of this cycle plays out. Stay tuned for more Linux 5.12 testing and benchmarking in the days ahead.
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