Linus Torvalds is back to his Sunday release routine and has made available the third release candidate for the Linux 3.12 kernel.
Torvalds notes in the mailing list announcement that there is nothing special that stands out in the release and most of the changes and updates are related to drivers, architecture and filesystem. There are quite a few reverts, but they are all related to mm. On a separate note, RC3 contains some performance-tweaking in the new lockref support for ARM and s390.
“…during the merge window Andrew sent some changes that were still being discussed, and we’re reverting them for now”, notes Torvalds.
Linux 3.12 is half way its release cycle and far off from the merge window and that is the reason the release hasn’t been “very scary.”
Linux 3.12-rc2 was released last week and that also didn’t have anything special or unexpected.
Linux 3.12 packs some amazing features including lot of improvements in the open-source graphics driver section, upgrades to various Linux file-systems, a lot of work on ARM, 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 among others. For more, read Linux 3.12 features here.
