Linux 5.12-rc3 Kernel Released

Following the emergency Linux 5.12-rc2 kernel release nine days ago, the Linux 5.12-rc3 is out today as a more pleasant release candidate that is back on the usual Sunday release regiment.

Given the two extra days, Linux 5.12-rc3 is larger than normal and there has been a lot of bug fixes to have landed this week anyhow. Aside from the changes stemming from the Linux 5.12-rc2 snafu, Linus Torvalds is siding with 5.12 looking like a smaller release. He noted in today's 5.12-rc3 announcement, "things look fairly normal - there's a big peak in the diffstat around the io_uring fallout from the new thread creation model, and sparc makes an unusual showing on the architecture updates side, but other than that it's all the usual things: drivers (gpu, net, usb, staging, sound... all over), architectures (x86, arm64, s390, powerpc in addition to the already-mentioned sparc), filesystems (cifs, nfs) and core kernel (networking, VM, timers, scheduler..). And the (by now) quite usual documentation and tooling updates (mainly perf tooling and selftests)."

So for now at least Linux 5.12 is looking like it will be a fairly "normal" cycle barring any major new issues from coming up in the weeks ahead. As noted in my latest report a few days ago, Linux 5.12 is looking good and stable relative to 5.11 on the many Intel and AMD systems I have been trying the post-rc2 snapshots on.

See our Linux 5.12 feature overview for the highlights of this next major kernel version that should debut as stable by the end of April.