Linux 5.16 Released With Many Intel & AMD Additions, Memory Folios, AMX, FUTEX2

As expected the Linux 5.16 kernel has been promoted to stable.

Linux 5.16 has many new features including the FUTEX2 futex_waitv system call for helping Steam Play (and Wine), memory folios have been mainlined, AMD Ryzen 6000 mobile series support is getting into better shape, Intel Alder Lake S graphics are now considered stable, Intel AMX support for Sapphire Rapids has landed, big AMD Ryzen with Radeon graphics performance improvements, and a wealth of other hardware improvements.

See our Linux 5.16 feature overview for the lengthy list of big changes to find in Linux 5.16.

Linus Torvalds wrote in tonight's announcement, "Not a lot here since -rc8, which is not unexpected. We had that extra week due to the holidays, and it's not like we had lots of last-minute things that needed to be sorted out. So this mainly contains some driver fixes (mainly networking and rdma), a cgroup credential use fix, a few core networking fixes, a couple of last-minute reverts, and some other random noise."

When running cloc on the Linux 5.16 source tree this afternoon, its size comes in at:

Linux 5.16 in source form is roughly 22.5 million lines of code, another 3.8 million lines of comments, and another 4 million blank lines spread out across 63.5k files. Or in total roughly 30.4 million lines for the current Linux Git tree.

Now on to the Linux 5.17 merge window with yet more exciting features coming. Linus Torvalds will be traveling during the Linux 5.17 merge window but otherwise is on to a great start for 2022.