Linux 5.16-rc8 Is A Tiny Holiday Release

Linux 5.16-rc8 is out today as a tiny holiday test candidate. If it weren't for the holidays, Linus Torvalds would have released the Linux 5.16 kernel today as stable but instead opted for an extra week of post-holiday testing.

Not much has changed with Linux 5.16-rc8 given that it was brewed the week between Christmas and New Year's. Linus also expects this forthcoming week to be light due to developers recovering from the holidays. Linux 5.16-rc8 brings just a few fixes to the GPU and networking drivers, among other random fixes thoguhout.

The brief Linux 5.16-rc8 announcement can be read on the kernel mailing list. Linux 5.16.0 will be out next Sunday, 9 January.

See the Linux 5.16 feature overview for a look at the changes in this first major kernel release of 2022.

Not yet acted upon for Linux 5.16 is any change around the new cluster aware scheduling hurting Alder Lake performance as I bisected and noted back in November. There are patches being floated to disable it for Alder Lake hybrid processors and making it configurable for x86 processors, but as of writing have not yet been mainlined for Linux 5.16 nor has there been any other changes like just disabling x86 cluster-aware scheduling for now... So as it stands now it looks like Linux 5.16 could be a release to avoid for Alder Lake users at least until any patches get back-ported to a point release. We'll see.