Linus Torvalds announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) Linux 5.12 last Sunday after a roadblock caused by power outages in the northwestern United States.
Due to wintry weather conditions and untimely power outages in Portland, Oregon, Torvalds reportedly decided to call this version the "Frozen Wasteland" core.
Linux 5.12-rc1 removes support for many ARM-on-Chip systems Older (SoC), which haven't been updated since the mid-2010s, and it also brings some new features.
In the age of telecommuting, power outages have a significant impact in projects, especially the Linux kernel project, as it has over 1000 contributors submitting tens of thousands of change requests to various drivers and other components.
Torvalds works from his home in Portland and lately the city has been without power for one week.
“Now we've had two unusual melting windows in a row: First, we had the holiday season, and this time in the Portland area, more than a quarter of a million people were without power because we had a winter ice storm that brought down thousands of people. trees and lots of power lines, ”Torvalds wrote in an email Sunday. "So I was actually out of power for the six days of the fusion window, and I was seriously considering extending the fusion window to do everything," he said.
But Torvalds said that didn't happen because people were "very good" at getting his extraction requests on time.
"When I finally got my energy back, everything was fine and I was able to put things together properly," explained Torvalds.
After talking about his week without energy, Torvalds described the changes and new features added to the Linux kernel. He announced that there have been more removals than additions in this release and that Linux 5.12 has done a historic cleanup.
“In general, we still have more new lines than we removed, but we did a general cleanup, removing support for the old OPROFILE (user tools use the years of the» perf «interface) and removing several old SoC platforms and various drivers. that no longer make sense, ”he said.
Among the main features new to version 5.12 are the "Clang link time optimizations", which improve compiler performance, and support for Intel's eASIC NX5 silicon, which aims to provide an alternative to FPGAs in edge and cloud applications. Here is an overview of the changes in Linux 5.12-rc1.
While on the part of the improvements for processors and SoC platforms, we can find the support for SiFive FU740 and HiFive Unmatched RISC-V cards, as well as the added NUMA support for RISC-V.
Whereas for Intel ASIC N5X and Snapdragon 888, it is now the new platforms that are now supported.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Added support for Lenovo laptop platform profile
- Added improved support for Microsoft Surface devices
- Adding Multiple Drivers for the x86 Platform
- Work was done on the elimination of old / obsolete ARM platforms in order to optimize the Kernel
- Added support for Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controller
- Adding the Nintendo 64 port
- Removal of support for Intel MID and with it support for Intel Simple Firmware Interface
- VFIO batch fixing for better performance
- Support for Linux kernel to boot as root partition in Microsoft hypervisor;
- KVM now allows user space to emulate the Xen hypercall
- Intel Xe VRR / Adaptive-Sync support
- Radeon RX 6800/6900 OverDrive series overclocking support
- FP16 pixel format support for more Radeon GPUs
- Many improvements have been made to AMDGPU support
- Ability to disable Intel graphics security mitigations
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