Last month Google engineers proposed multi-generational LRU for Linux to enhance the kernel performance and today the work has advanced to a second version.
The Linux 5.12 stable kernel release is quickly approaching but may be challenged by an extra release candidate.
Linus Torvalds put out Linux 5.12-rc6 on schedule even with the Easter holiday and it's a delightfully small update.
Today's release of Linux 5.12-rc5 is "bigger than average" for this stage of kernel development and if that keeps up is likely to result in an extra week's worth of testing / an -rc8 release ahead of Linux 5.12 final, but it's too early to call at this stage.
Excitement is building around initial support for the Rust language within the Linux kernel that arrived in Linux-Next and is now seeing more developer interest.
The fourth weekly release candidate to Linux 5.12 is now available for testing ahead of its anticipated stable release next month.
For a long while now Linux kernel developers have discusses the prospects of optionally allowing the Rust language to be used for new device drivers within the Linux kernel areas and other areas within the kernel for this language that prides itself on safety and performance. As the first baby step towards that dream, initial Rust support appeared this week in the Linux-Next tree.
Following the emergency Linux 5.12-rc2 kernel release nine days ago, the Linux 5.12-rc3 is out today as a more pleasant release candidate that is back on the usual Sunday release regiment.
With that nasty swapfile issue behind us, the Linux 5.12 kernel is looking to be in good shape and on my tests so far across a number of different Intel and AMD systems I am not seeing any major surprises.
Just two days after the release of Linux 5.11.4 it has now been succeeded by Linux 5.11.5 and the maintained LTS kernels also saw new releases this morning.
While Linux 5.12-rc2 released on Friday due to that prominent corruption bug, there still is some Sunday kernel fun with Greg Kroah-Hartman releasing a slew of stable kernel updates including Linux 5.11.4 and 5.10.21 LTS.
While Linus Torvalds long has released his new kernel releases -- both release candidates and the inaugural stable releases -- every Sunday, there are the occasional exceptions like this week with Linux 5.12-rc2 being issued on Friday night. The Linux 5.12-rc2 release has come early due to that nasty file-system corruption issue stemming from botched swapfile handling.
Linus Torvalds has now warned developers over using Linux 5.12-rc1 as a basis for their future branches and is looking to release 5.12-rc2 ahead of schedule as a result of that problematic file-system corruption bug stemming from a swap file bug.
Recent kernel point releases have reported erroneous maximum frequencies on AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 CPUs in the area of 6GHz+ while now with the latest stable releases that is being fixed.
For those wanting to help in testing out the Linux 5.12 kernel, at least it should no longer eat your data now if you rely on a swapfile.
Last week I issued a warning of possible data loss on the early Linux 5.12 kernel code that was reliably leaving my test systems severely corrupted. Intel's internal graphics test systems it turns out have now been bitten by this issue in encountering this significant file-system corruption and as such they've been quick to jump on the issue - there's now an idea what's causing the nasty issue and a workaround by reverting select patches.
The Linux kernel source tree following the eventful 5.12 merge window is at 28.81 million lines in the source tree across more than sixty thousand files. The largest in-tree kernel driver continues to be the AMDGPU kernel driver, which in the next kernel release or so should be crossing three million lines.
Linus Torvalds issued the first release candidate tonight of Linux 5.12 following an unusual merge window.
Greg Kroah-Hartman this week sent in "the large set of char/misc/whatever driver subsystem updates", which as usual -- given it's a catch-all area of kernel drivers not fitting well into other subsystems -- there is an interesting mix of additions.
Linus Torvalds just merged a set of patches that includes KFence. Short for the Kernel Electric Fence, KFence is a low-overhead memory safety error detector/validator that is suitable for use in production kernel builds.
As a quick PSA for those that may be eager to test out early Git builds of the Linux 5.12 kernel, I've been hitting a very nasty issue on multiple systems leading to corruption / data loss.
Last week the main set of DRM subsystem updates were sent in for the Linux 5.12 merge window. That pull included exciting additions like Radeon RX 6000 series OverDrive and Intel Xe VRR. Mistakenly left out of that pull request last week were the open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver improvements for the "MSM" kernel driver while now that code has landed.
After a two year hiatus on the patches, VMware's Nadav Amit has gotten back to working on current TLB flushing support for the Linux kernel in yielding a small but measurable performance improvement.
The HID subsystem updates were sent in this morning for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window.
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.
An exciting new capability with perf in Linux 5.12 is the ability to collect instruction latency metrics as part of the performance reports, but relies on hardware capabilities for now only found in next-generation Intel Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors.
The DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window. Two of the biggest features are VRR/Adaptive-Sync now being supported for Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics while on the AMD side there is initial "OverDrive" overclocking support for their newest RDNA 2 GPUs.
There is an interesting change with the TTY/serial changes for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel.
Released yesterday was the Linux 5.10.17 LTS kernel and what makes this point release a bit more notable than usual is that it backports the CPUFreq patches from 5.11 that were used for addressing the earlier AMD performance regression on Linux 5.11 and often leading to net improvements as well over prior kernel series. The CPUFreq patches were back-ported while the AMD frequency invariance support was not, so what does the performance look like for the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel? Here are some benchmarks.
Independent kernel hacker Con Kolivas is out with his latest "ck" patch-set against the newly-minted Linux 5.11 stable kernel and re-basing the MuQSS scheduler against the latest code-base.
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