Linux 5.12 Git Seeing New Code Land Following Winter Storm

While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list.

Texas had all the attention this past week for their massive outages, but Portland also experienced a brutal winter storm last weekend. The Oregon winter storm knocked out power to thousands and ended up interfering with the start of the Linux 5.12 merge window.

It seems since Saturday evening though Linus Torvalds is back online as pull requests have begun to be honored with new code now hitting the Git tree.

Besides the lack of Git activity, Linus Torvalds was also absent from mailing list discussions. Yesterday he did respond to a comment on the kernel mailing list but aside from that his last comments were shortly after the Linux 5.11 release last Sunday night.

Let there be light... And Git!

Linus now has a large backlog of pull requests to work through for the Linux 5.12 merge window. There still is another week to go until Linux 5.12-rc1 though we'll see if there are any delays as a result of Torvalds' absence for nearly one week -- it may end up being fine given the expectation that developers have all their pull requests ready of new code prior to the merge window, but we'll see if the backlog ends up burdening Linus or he is still able to process them all smoothly over the next week without delay.

In any case, Linux 5.12 is shaping up to be another exciting kernel cycle.