Linux 5.12-rc5 Released - It's Bigger Than Average

Today's release of Linux 5.12-rc5 is "bigger than average" for this stage of kernel development and if that keeps up is likely to result in an extra week's worth of testing / an -rc8 release ahead of Linux 5.12 final, but it's too early to call at this stage.

While Linux 5.12-rc4 last week was smaller than average, Linux 5.12-rc5 ticked up to being larger than average. It's not too absurdly big or anything but enough that if the trend continues, it would result in an extra release candidate.

Of the fixes this week, Torvalds noted, "Most of the changes are drivers (gpu and networking stand out, but there's various other smaller driver updates elsewhere too) with core networking (including bpf) fixes being another noticeable subsystem. Other than that, there's a smattering of noise all over: minor arch fixes, some filesystem fixes (btrfs, cifs, squashfs), selinux, perf tools, documentation. io_uring continues to have noise in it, this time mainly due to some signal handling fixes. That removed a fair amount of problematic special casing, but the timing certainly isn't great."

Of the fixes notable this week are continued work on S0ix handling for AMDGPU, another Sienna Cichlid PCI ID added to AMDGPU, Lenvoo ThinkPad X1 Tablet Gen2 support for the Intel HID driver, some Btrfs fixes, continued Clang compiler support fixes, and lots of mundane small fixes.

See our Linux 5.12 feature overview to see the new features and changes for this kernel that should reach stable by the end of April depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out.