Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux operating system, recently had to face six days without electricity during the power outages in the North-Western US caused due to the winter storms. He lives in Portland, Oregon and the six-day power outage did not let him tend to the kernel. So, how did the inventor spend his time? By working on the merge window for version 5.12 on the Linux kernel. Torvalds gave the Linux 5.12-rc1 the codename of ‘Frozen Wasteland’ and issued the first release on February 28, as per a report by Phoronix.
Unable to work on the new kernel cycle due to the six-days-long power cut, Torvalds decided to attend to the Linux 5.12 merge window and succeeded in rolling it out as Linux 5.12-rc1.
He said in the 5.12-rc1 announcement: “The one thing that perhaps stands out is that this release actually did a fair amount of historical cleanup. Yes, overall we still have more new lines than we have removed lines, but we did have some spring cleaning, removing the legacy OPROFILE support (the user tools have been using the “perf” interface for years), and removing several legacy SoC platforms and various drivers that no longer make any sense.”
So what does the new kernel have in store for users? As per the report by Phoronix, the stable Linux 5.12 release should occur in April-May. Some of the highlights of the kernel, as per the report, are using Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO), Kleak as kernel memory leak detector, IDMAPPED mounts, support for AMD Radeon RX 6800 series overclocking, Intel Xe VRR/Adaptive-Sync, the addition of Sony PlayStation 5 Dual Sense driver and more.