Come Sunday and Linus Torvalds is ready to release the next release candidate for Linux kernel – this week it was the Linux 3.12-rc5.
Torvalds released the Linux 3.12-rc5 noting that the things have been calming down as compared to a previous two weeks where quite a lot of changes were being pushed through even past the merge window. “Things seem to be calming down nicely, and rc5 is smaller than previous rc’s”, notes the Kernel guru in the mailing list announcement.
The Linux 3.12-rc5 doesn’t bring in anything extra special apart from the usual driver and architecture fixes along with improvements in the Linux file-systems. “Aside from that, most of the changes here are the usual architecture fixes (tile, arm, x86, s390) and drivers (gpu, hid, sound, i2c, watchdog)” notes Torvalds.
One thing that did stand out during the week – a non-kernel “compiler bug wrt asm goto.” The bug was a result of code that was pending to be merged in Linux 3.13, but it has been fixed now as a “(happily fairly straightforward) workaround for the bug was merged early,” notes Torvalds.
Some of the important features of Linux 3.12 include support for zRAM, AMD Berlin APU and Snapdragon DRM/KMS drivers; revised version of SimpleDRM; full support for eLLC cache; improvement to Intel GMA-500 Poulsbo driver; improvements in the open-source graphics driver; upgrades to various Linux file-systems; and a lot of work on ARM among others. For more, read Linux 3.12 features here.
