Linux 5.16-rc7 Released Following A Quiet Christmas Week

Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.16-rc7 today as the newest weekly test candidate while the official Linux 5.16 stable release should happen in two weeks.

With it being Christmas week, Linux 5.16-rc7 is small and with no big surprises. Linus Torvalds noted in the 5.16-rc7 announcement, "To the surprise of absolutely nobody, this rc7 is fairly small. The stats look pretty normal, with about three quarters being drivers (networking, input, sound, tee, hwmon, rdma..). Somewhat unusually, we have a PC keyboard controller (not USB - the old legacy kind) fix in here - one of the earliest supported hardware still hangs around, and still gets some probe-time changes for odd hardware. The rest is mainly some kvm and networking fixes, and a few random stragglers elsewhere."

Linux 5.16 hasn't yet pulled in any changes around x86 cluster-aware scheduling for avoiding the Intel Alder Lake performance drop introduced in 5.16 either by pulling in the new patches making it more configurable or outright disabling for Alder Lake on 5.16 or opting to the x86 cluster-aware scheduling defaulting to off entirely for 5.16. We'll see what makes it into this current stable cycle.

There are many exciting Linux 5.16 kernel features for when this next release does make its debut in January following the holidays.