Linux 5.12-rc7 Kernel Released - It's Big And Causing Some Concern

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 11 April 2021 at 06:47 PM EDT. 4 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
The Linux 5.12 stable kernel release is quickly approaching but may be challenged by an extra release candidate.

Following last weekend's "positively tiny" Linux 5.12-rc6 kernel, Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.12-rc7 a few minutes ago. The 5.12 kernel has bumped back to being larger than expected for this late stage of development. Linus has yet to decide if this will mean an extra week's worth of testing or if things are looking good for releasing as stable and avoiding an extra release candidate.

Torvalds wrote of 5.12-rc7, "Oh well. rc5 was big. rc6 was small. And now rc7 is big again. In fact, it's the biggest rc7 (at least in number of commits) we've had in the 5.x series. It's mostly due to networking fixes (of which rc6 had none), and none of them should be all that scary, but it's never great when we have such a big rc. It's particularly annoying at the end of the release window like this."

If all goes well this week ahead it will mean Linux 5.12 debuts next weekend otherwise is dragged into overtime with 5.12-rc8. Linus commented, "I'm still waffling about the final 5.12 release. The fact that we have a big rc7 does make me think that I'll probably do an rc8 this time around. But it ends up depending a bit on how the upcoming week goes, and if things are deathly quiet, I may end up deciding that an rc8 doesn't really make sense."

See our Linux 5.12 feature overview to learn more about all of the changes coming with this major kernel release due out this month.
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